Interesting. I was about to type up a quotation from Simon Blackburn for something I’m working on, and before doing so thought I might as well check our Quotations in case we already had it there (then I would only need to copy it instead of typing). We don’t, but we do have one that is pleasingly relevant to the subject we’ve been discussing lately, along with Brian Leiter. So I thought I would put it here. It’s from Prospect, April 2003.

It is not the slavish remnant of a religious worldview to admit that the person who has gone and looked is more of an authority than one who has not. It is not just convention which

Ah good. Amazon has corrected the little oddity whereby it named the alphabetically first author of the Fashionable Dictionary and disappeared the alphabetically second one. I filled out the correction thing last week, but it looks as if Amazon has also heard from the publisher, because the jacket flap copy is now on the page, which it wasn’t last week. So here is the page. You can order your copy or copies right now, thus making a first printing of fifty thousand copies necessary. Or at any rate you can admire the page, and the jacket copy, and the presence of two names instead of just one, and the mention of B&W. Or you can just roll your eyes … Read the rest

This is a nice bit of dovetailing, of convergence, of two minds with but a single thought, of – okay, we get the idea. Brian Leiter was talking about different examples of exactly the same kind of thing I was talking about two days ago, in ‘Close Reading’. The Little Professor noticed the parallel. Leiter’s post is really interesting; it touches on several issues I have on my sort of mental list of things to discuss sometime. It quotes Andrea Lafferty, director of something called ‘the Traditional Values Coalition’ (oh please) saying ‘There’s an arrogance in the scientific community that they know better than the average American.’ Well – uh – yeah. Because they probably do, ya know? Seeing as … Read the rest

That’s quite amusing. I wrote the comment below before I read Julian’s new Bad Moves, which also has partly to do with Prince Charles’ medical expertise compared with that of mere, you know, medical experts.

The strict dietary regime in question is the Gerson Therapy, which eschews drugs in favour of coffee enemas and fruit juices. It has the support of well-known medical experts such as Prince Charles, interior designer Dudley Poplak and Lord Baldwin of Bewdley. Their opinions, of course, carry more weight than those of the American Cancer Society, which warns that the treatment could be dangerous.

Pure coincidence, that. And then he goes on to make an excellent point about language that helps question-begging to do … Read the rest

I re-read an article yesterday or Sunday that I kept wanting to do a comment on as I read it. Line by line, even word by word, in places. I wanted to comment not just on the article as a whole, but on each bit of sly rhetoric as I read and noticed it. Not a macro-comment but a micro one, not an overall comment but a close-up.

And that reminded me, in an almost nostalgic, sentimental way, of the beginning of N&C. In September or October 2002, when we were thinking about and discussing what to include on B&W, what features to add. It reminded me that we didn’t exactly think of N&C as a blog, at first, or … Read the rest