From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Sep 08 2002 - 19:16:38 MDT
At 05:32 PM 9/8/02 -0700, Max wrote:
>>What about the notion of "effing"? Has anyone ever used this term in a
>>story, or anywhere else for that matter?
>I'm fairly sure that the term was used by one of the more literary
>philosophers, perhaps Daniel Dennett, quite a few years ago.
Yeah, it's been around for effing years. Gregory Benford was fond of
it--not in this particular sense of extended symmetrical empathy,
however--and would add such extras as `unscrewing the inscrutable'.
(Oscar Wilde might have started all this inadvertently with his summary of
ruling class fox-hunting: `The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable',
which I sometimes weirdly misremember as `The inaudible in pursuit of the
inedible'.)
Damien Broderick
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