[MD] Doug Renselle & Language

[David Thomas]

Mangus, Krimel, All

Doug and I conversed off-line way back and I pointed out to him at that time
his made up language made it almost impossible for me to understand what he
was trying to say. But he thought is was better, more concise, and I kept
trying to tell him that it was this exclusive language that kept philosophy
from providing any real value to society at large. Of course we never
resolved that one.

Way back I proposed that what Pirsig had done was take the two most common
definitions of quality and merged them into one. Starting here..........

Quality
1 a : peculiar and essential character : nature <her ethereal quality ‹ Gay
Talese> b : an inherent feature : property <had a quality of stridence,
dissonance ‹ Roald Dahl> c : capacity, role <in the quality of reader and
companion ‹ Joseph Conrad>
2 a : degree of excellence : grade <the quality of competing air service ‹
Current Biography> b : superiority in kind <merchandise of quality>

And end up with something like this:

Quality is all the peculiar and essential characters, features, properties
that make anything what it is, including its degree of excellence in
adapting or responding to environmental constraints and opportunities.

The quasi "objective" first definition married to the quasi "subjective"
second definition. Oh horrors! Bo in particular threw a complete tizzy over
this. I had absolutely no smidgen of understanding what Pirsig was talking
about. But if you look at how RMP uses the word over and over again
throughout both books it is not an unfair one sentence recap of the general
gist of things in un-philosophical common language.

Yes you can go on and put more and more qualification on the statement to
make it more precise but in general it works. At least for me.

Dave