There Are Synechdoches, and There Are Synechdoches

By -
My fellow Americans, it is fine to use "Wall Street" as a synechdoche for "the financial industry." No one is offended.

But when you say "England" but really mean "the United Kingdom," the Welsh, Scottish and (northern) Irish do find it a bit disturbing. OK?

Comments

  1. rob10:10 PM

    English people find it annoying too

    ReplyDelete
  2. traumerei10:25 PM

    Do northern Irish get mad if people speak as if they are from Great Britain? Because if I recall correctly, they were still part of Team Gee Bee in London 2012.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah3:38 PM

      The Northern Irish can actually compete for Ireland or GB!

      Delete
  3. Jim9:40 AM

    The wogs begin at Bar Harbor.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Rob1:18 PM

    Gene,
    I am glad you have finally seen the error in your ways!

    para 3

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah3:38 PM

      Rob, who wrote that crap you link to?

      Delete
  5. Unknown11:56 PM

    Finally, you said something about Scotland that we can both agree on! Actually, sort of related to this, did you know that the numbering system of the British monarch is fair to both the Scots and the English? When I thought about the fact that Elizabeth was called Elizabeth II, my Scots pride was offended because Elizabeth I only ruled England. She NEVER ruled Scotland. However, after researching the issue I found that they made the system fair to both the English and the Scots. The rule is that if the name was present in both countries, the next monarch of that name would take the next number from the country with the higher number. So, for example, if there is another James, he would be James VIII NOT James III. If the regal version of the name only exists in one country, then of course the next number is taken. So, England, I don't think, ever had a King Robert, but Scotland had two, so the next King Robert would be Robert III of the United Kingdom even though there was never a King Robert of England. Interesting isn't it?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Current7:03 AM

    The english find it irritating too.

    Unknown - I did not know that.

    Sport in Northern Ireland and the Republic is very complicated. Sometimes competitions are all Ireland, sometimes they're just for the republic or north. Sometimes the republic has a national team, sometimes there's an all-ireland national team.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Bob Murphy3:31 PM

    Rob @1:18pm, that was a thing of beauty. Once I read the link, I remembered Gene having written that--since he was one of my favorite LRC contributors--but I never would've remembered. That's amazing.

    Gene you should go say penance or something.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah4:21 PM

      Bob, I have been doing penance for four years now for the things I wrote at LRC.

      Delete
    2. Unknown12:58 AM

      Since you brought it up...what happened four years ago? What made you change sides? Was it something specific or evolutionary?

      Senyor

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more