Dictionary of Fine Distinctions: a conversation with Eli Burnstein
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- Опубликовано: 28 июн 2024
- Dr. Ellie Anderson, Philosophy professor and co-host of Overthink podcast, sits down with humor writer and former philosopher Eli Burnstein about his recent book, Dictionary of Fine Distinctions: Nuances, Niceties, and Subtle Shades of Meaning. They discuss why one should care about subtle shades of meaning, Burnstein's distinction between ethics and morality, and some philosophy of language along the way. Check out Burnstein's book here: www.unionsquareandco.com/9781....
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I've always believed that people think "along different lines" in different languages, that not only vocabulary, but also grammar and even the sounds, will tend to orient us in ways we're not aware of, such that patterns diverge from where they might have been otherwise, that there are constant, subtle, cumulative effects. Form is immensely powerful.
I love it when people talk about nuances, distinctions. Thomas Bauer wrote an essay in 2018 that got published as a small book (Reclam) and won a philosophy award, the name of which book is "Die Vereindeutigung der Welt". I highly recommend it to anyone who reads German because it contains a brilliant explanation of the two mechanisms behind the contemporary world's loss of nuance, which could be thought of as flip sides of the same phenomenon. Original thinking that made something click in my brain. I'm sure that an English translation would find an audience, and it's brief.
Great conversation and book concept. Thank you!
Linguee shows us their corpus, which is drawn from EU texts and their translations in various languages. Also, the superb German-language online dictionary DWDS has a gigantic corpus, from which it shows examples, as well as providing access to the whole thing.
❤#Visit Scotland ❤
"Moralität" is really rare in contemporary German, especially in that sense. It also means "morality play" and appears, oddly misspelled, in the Mackie Messer lyrics by Bert Brecht from the Threepennny Opera, "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer". "Sittlichkeit" comes from "Sitte", plural, "Sitten", which refers to social customs, in general, and kind of blends into "manners", so for me, it has always had a much less hardcore meaning than "ethics".
Eli: "[The debate about words' meanings shifting from their Latin roots] is evocative..."
Me: *Hmm, 'evocative---> e [out of] + vocare [to call] ---> 'to call out'*
Great word to use at this point 🤣