{"id":323114,"date":"2010-02-15T07:50:55","date_gmt":"2010-02-15T12:50:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2120"},"modified":"2010-02-15T07:50:55","modified_gmt":"2010-02-15T12:50:55","slug":"morgenbesserisms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/323114","title":{"rendered":"Morgenbesserisms"},"content":{"rendered":"

A footnote in Steven Strogatz’s NYT opinion piece on negative numbers<\/a> (he’s in favor of them, I think) is a good excuse to revisit my inadequate (but apparently canonical) collection of the witticisms of Sidney Morgenbesser (“If P, so why not Q?<\/a>“, 8\/5\/2004), and to ask if anyone has more to add to the list.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

I’ll contribute some quotations from Wikipedia<\/a> that were missing from my 2004 list:<\/p>\n

Morgenbesser was leaving a subway station in New York City and put his pipe in his mouth as he was ascending the steps. A police officer told him that there was no smoking on the subway. Morgenbesser pointed out that he was leaving the subway, not entering it, and hadn’t lit up yet anyway. The cop repeated his injunction. Morgenbesser repeated his observation. After a few such exchanges, the cop saw he was beaten and fell back on the oldest standby of enfeebled authority: “If I let you do it, I’d have to let everyone do it.” To this the old professor replied, “Who do you think you are, Kant?” The word “Kant” was mistaken for a vulgar epithet and Morgenbesser had to explain the situation at the police station.<\/p>\n

To B.F. Skinner, “Let me see if I understand your thesis. You think we shouldn\u2019t anthropomorphize people?”<\/p>\n

Morgenbesser once set this as an exam question: \u201cIt is often said that Marx and Freud went too far. How far would you go?\u201d<\/p>\n

“The only problem with pragmatism is that it’s completely useless.”<\/p>\n

When asked his opinion of pragmatism, Morgenbesser replied “It’s all very well in theory but it doesn’t work in practice.”<\/p>\n

Asked to prove a questioner’s existence, Morgenbesser shot back, “Who’s asking?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A footnote in Steven Strogatz’s NYT opinion piece on negative numbers (he’s in favor of them, I think) is a good excuse to revisit my inadequate (but apparently canonical) collection of the witticisms of Sidney Morgenbesser (“If P, so why not Q?“, 8\/5\/2004), and to ask if anyone has more to add to the list. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4144,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-323114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4144"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=323114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323114\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=323114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=323114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=323114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}