From yesterday morning’s post “An Object Lesson” —
A search for the origin of a photo in yesterday’s New York Times
obituary of linguist Geoffrey Nunberg yields . . .
“Words are not things, but activities,” observed Dwight Bolinger,
a revered linguist who taught at Harvard before retiring to Palo Alto,
and he might have been describing Nunberg. Early this morning—
about 2:30 a.m.—he called Bolinger’s words “my favorite linguistic
epigram” in his posting on the Language Log, where blogging linguists
“chew the electronic fat,” as Nunberg puts it.
— Ann Hurst, undated article in Stanford Magazine , March/April 2005
In reality, Nunberg said something slightly different —
Meanwhile, elsewhere . . .
Scholium —
From Log24’s Language Game, Jan. 14, 2004 —
“Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations :
373. Grammar tells what kind of object anything is. (Theology as grammar.)”