same place -- same time [was: Vlad and Dracula]

[Joel S. Berson]

They -- the Impaler and the Count; Clark and
Superman -- always *are* in the same place at the
same time.  It's just that only one or the other
is visible to any observer at any one time.  See Schrödinger's cat.

Thus the answer to the question "Have you ever
seen X and Y in the same place at the same time?"
will be "No."  But the researchers are asking the
wrong question.  It should be "Have X and Y both
been seen in the same place at the same time?"

It is no coincidence that Schrödinger's cat and
Superman both appeared around the same time --
circa 1935.  But not in the same place.  The
influence of the Copenhagen interpretation of
quantum mechanics on Siegel and Shuster has yet to be properly analyzed.

Joel

At 6/1/2014 10:33 AM, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>At 5/31/2014 08:25 PM, George Thompson wrote:
>>
>>JB, quoting the NYTimes:
>>  "Have you ever seen Count Dracula and Vlad the Impaler in the same place
>>at the same time?"
>>
>>It seems to me that this is a formula -- "Have you ever seen X and Y
>>together"?, or, as here, "in the same place at the same time?" -- that I
>>have encountered from time to time of late, usually written with a
>>humorously raised eyebrow.
>>Any evidence of its origin?
>>
>>GAT
>>
>>
>>On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 10:15 AM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
>>
>> > The famous Margalit Fox -- check the ADS-L archives -- has written
>> > another elegant and sly obituary, this time about Radu Florescu, who
>> > died on May 18.  In the NYTimes -- at least the New England Edition
>> > -- May 29, page B17.  (For unknown reasons, the on-line Times won't
>> > give it to me.  Search results for, say, "Dracula", Newest first, are
>> > to say the least peculiar; and a search for "Margalit Fox"
>> > produces  zero results in the Past 7 Days.)  Anyhoo, juicy excerpts:
>> >
>> > [Opening paragraphs:]
>> >      "Have you ever seen Count Dracula and Vlad the Impaler in the
>> > same place at the same time?
>> >      "Of course not, and that, according to Radu Florescu, is
>> > precisely the point: The two men, he argued, were one and the same."
>> > ...
>> >      "By day, Professor taught at Boston College, where, at his
>> > death, he was an emeritus professor of history ..."
>> > [One intervening paragraph.]
>> >      "But thanks to his moonlight job, Professor Florescu was for
>> > four decades also one of the world's leading experts in matters Dracular."
>> >
>> > [This is the minimally relevant bit:  Dracular (adj.) not in
>> > OED.  But 'll bet the professor and the count also were never seen in
>> > the same place at the same time.]
>> > ...
>> >      "As he would learn in the course of his research, he had a
>> > family connection to Vlad, who was known familiarly if not quite
>> > fondly as Vlad Tepes, or Vlad the Impaler. A Florescu ancestor was
>> > said to have married Vlad's brother,
>> felicitously named Radu the Handsome."
>> > ...
>> >      "Both Vlad and Count Dracula displayed marked criminal
>> > proclivities: Vlad was know for dispatching his Ottoman foes (as may
>> > as 100,000 in some accounts) with sharpened stakes. Dracula, who did
>> > not care for stakes, favored a more direct approach."
>> >
>> > [And the concluding paragraph:]
>> >      "If, in his second career, Professor Florescu risked the
>> > opprobrium of some ivory-tower colleagues, he seemed unperturbed. At
>> > Dracula conventions around the world -- and there are many -- he
>> > sometimes materialized wearing a cape, a reliable indication that
>> > when it came to Stoker's sanguinary protagonist, Professor Florescu
>> > did not mind sticking his neck out."
>> >
>> > RIP.
>> >
>> > Joel
>> >
>> > ------------------------------------------------------------
>> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>> >
>>
>>
>>
>>--
>>George A. Thompson
>>The Guy Who Still Looks Stuff Up in Books.
>>Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
>>Univ. Pr., 1998..
>>
>>------------------------------------------------------------
>>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org