{"id":6539,"date":"2016-04-05T07:22:30","date_gmt":"2016-04-05T07:22:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2016\/04\/05\/a-waste-of-a-good-hyphen\/"},"modified":"2016-04-05T07:22:30","modified_gmt":"2016-04-05T07:22:30","slug":"a-waste-of-a-good-hyphen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2016\/04\/05\/a-waste-of-a-good-hyphen\/","title":{"rendered":"A Waste of a Good Hyphen"},"content":{"rendered":"

A reader doesn't get the point of my earlier entry:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Use-Mention Confusion<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Dennis Miller:  "Melissa Harris-Perry is a waste of a good hyphen."<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So let me explain it.  Miller is a brilliant conservative comedian who appears regularly on The O'Reilly Factor<\/em>.  If you catch every one of Miller's allusions and can follow his rap you are very sharp indeed.  He has contempt for flaming leftists like Harris-Perry. Realizing that the Left's Alinskyite tactics need to be turned against them, and that mockery and derision can be very effective political weapons, he took a nasty but brilliant jab at her in the above-quoted line.<\/span><\/p>\n

What makes the jab comical is Miller's willful confusion of the use and mention of expressions, one class of which is the proper name. One USES the name 'Melissa Harris-Perry' to refer to the person in question.  This person, the bearer of the name, is not a name or any type of expression.  The person in question eats and drinks and fulminates; no name eats and drinks and fulminates. But if I point out that 'Melissa Harris-Perry' is a hyphenated expression, I MENTION the expression; I am talking about it<\/em>, not about its referent or bearer.  When I say that the name is hyphenated I say something obviously true; if I say or imply  that the woman in question is hyphenated, then I say or imply something that is either necessarily false or else incoherent (because involving a Rylean category mistake) and thus lacking a truth value.  Either way I am not saying anything true let alone obviously true.<\/span><\/p>\n

But what makes Miller's jab funny?  What in general makes a joke funny?  This question belongs to the philosophy of humor, and I can tell you that it is no joke<\/em>.  (That itself is a joke, a meta-joke.)  There are three or four going theories of humor.  One of them, the Incongruity Theory, fits many instances of humor.  Suppose you ask me what time it is and I reply:  You mean now?<\/em>  If I say this in the right way you will laugh.  (If you don't, then, like Achmed the Terrorist, I kill you!) Now what make the joke funny?  It is an instance of incongruity, but I will leave the details for you to work out.  And the same goes for the joke in parentheses.<\/span><\/p>\n

It is the same with the Miller joke.  Everybody understands implicitly that a name is not the same as its bearer, that some names are hyphenated, and that no human being is hyphenated.  Normal people understand facts like these even if they have never explicitly formulated them.  What Miller does to achieve his comic effect is to violate this implicit understanding.  It is the incongruity of Miller's jab with our normal implicit understanding that generates the humorousness of the situation.<\/span><\/p>\n

But WHY should it have this effect?  Why should incongruity be perceived by us as funny?  Perhaps I can get away with saying that this is just the way things are.  Explanations must end somewhere.<\/span><\/p>\n

Am I a pedant or what?<\/span><\/p>\n

But I am not done.    <\/span><\/p>\n

There is also a moral question.  Isn't there something morally shabby about mocking a person's name and making jokes at his expense? Some years back I was taken aback when Michael Reagan referred to George Stephanopolous on the air as George Step-on-all-of-us.  A gratuitous cheap-shot, I thought.<\/span><\/p>\n

But given how willfully stupid and destructive Harris-Perry is, and given that politics is war by another name, is there not a case for using the Left's Alinksyite tactics against them?  (Is this a rhetorical question or am I really asking?  I'm not sure myself.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Here<\/a> is a bit of evidence that Harris-Perry really is a a willfully stupid, destructive race-baiter.  There is another in the first entry referenced below.<\/span><\/p>\n

\nRelated articles<\/span><\/legend>\n
\n
\"\"<\/a>Dennis Miller on Obama<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>'Religious Profiling'<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>Christology, Reduplicatives, and Qua-Entities<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/fieldset>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A reader doesn't get the point of my earlier entry: Use-Mention Confusion Dennis Miller:  "Melissa Harris-Perry is a waste of a good hyphen." So let me explain it.  Miller is a brilliant conservative comedian who appears regularly on The O'Reilly Factor.  If you catch every one of Miller's allusions and can follow his rap you … Continue reading “A Waste of a Good Hyphen”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[242,158,6,163,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humor","category-invective","category-language-matters","category-leftism-and-political-correctness","category-race"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6539\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}