[Ads-l] quote: fire in a wooden box

[Laurence Horn]

> On May 24, 2016, at 3:56 PM, Geoffrey Steven Nathan <geoffnathan at wayne.edu> wrote:
> 
> I'm pretty sure it is in the Joos reader. And my memory is that it was not linguistics in general, but rather semantics in particular.

Really?  I don't recall semantics even being mentioned in the Joos reader. Lots of phonology and morphology, a bit of syntax, but no semantics.
I remember the bit about languages differing from each other without limit and the bit about how only children demand explanations, and how there is a child in each of us but descriptivism makes a virtue of not pampering that child.  Waaaah waaaah. 

I'll try to see what I can find--my copy is still somewhere on my office shelves.

LH

> He had a number of italicized comments about articles and I think it's one of those.
> 
> Unfortunately my copy is in a box in the garage, as we are about to do house renovations.
> 
> Joos, Martin (ed), 1966. Readings in Linguistics I. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
> 
> Geoff
> 
> Geoffrey S. Nathan
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> ________________________________________
> From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2016 3:47 PM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: quote: fire in a wooden box
> 
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      quote: fire in a wooden box
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> query from David Gold dl.gold at yahoo.com
> 
> As a student of linguistics in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I remember r=
> eading the quip "linguistics [or maybe it was: defining linguistics] is lik=
> e making a fire in a wooden box," that is, language is used to describe lan=
> guage.
> 
> I have a vague recollection that the quipster was Martin Joos or some other=
> American structuralist (Bloomfield? Bolinger?).
> 
> Now that I want to cite the quip, I cannot find the exact wording or the au=
> thor. Might you know?
> 
> ....
> 
> AMZ: if you respond, please send a copy of your e-mail to David Gold, who's=
> not a subscriber to this list. (i am not a good forwarding service.)
> 
> arnold=
> 
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