Misinterpretation

The science of analysis of language is dying. Over the last few weeks, what I write has been misinterpreted by otherwise intelligent people not a few times. That seems to be because they interpolate and extrapolate without sufficient justification.

I do try very hard to be careful with my words. However, in the past this has led to accusations of deviousness.

This is how it happens: I say or write something. Somebody else interprets it wrongly, looks stupid. Blames me for what I didn't say. Is shocked when I defend myself and then accuses me of being devious by laying a trap in my words for people to fall into...

Sigh. There is almost always a very good reason for putting my thoughts in such a form — I deliberately avoid saying things I don't mean or which I cannot verify; I use phrases like 'seems to be' or 'might imply that' when the degree of certainty is not as firm as I would prefer it to be.

Old Thoughts

Donne's famous Meditation XVII tends to eclipse his other works in the mind of modern man, perhaps because the phrase 'For Whom The Bell Tolls' was etched by Hemingway on the modern literary consciousness. But Donne wrote profusely and entertainingly, and what he wrote is good basis material for people professing to know anything about 'Knowledge and Inquiry', as some in Atlantis do these days.

For example, in Meditation XX, he writes:

The arts and sciences are most properly referred to the head; that is their proper element and sphere; but yet the art of proving, Logic, and the art of persuading, Rhetoric, are deduced to the hand, and that expressed by a hand contracted into a fist, and this by a hand enlarged, and expanded; and evermore the power of man, and the power of God himself is expressed so, 'All things are in his hand'. Neither is God so often presented to us, by names that carry our consideration upon counsel, as upon execution of counsel; he is oftener called the Lord of Hosts, than by all other names, that may be referred to the other signification.

Such thoughts are interesting. They dig deep into the heart of language and the hidden assumptions we make in the use of metaphor and image. It would be valuable even for those who care nothing for Christianity and its range of cultures and cultural history, to undertake the equivalent exercise into their own ideas, models, tropes and schemata.