pds (02/11/83)
During some TV commercial last night my mind seized on one of the
lines and would not let go until it was thoroughly mangled (the line,
that is). "... requests your presence at the ..." read the invitation.
A nastier person might send, I mused, a somewhat more insidious note, an
anti-invitation (as might persons in a universe with different defaults --
invited to all functions unless specifically requested to remain absent)
perhaps reading "... requests your absence at the ...". More bombastically
this would read "... requests the presence of your absence at the ...," or
perhaps "... requests the absence of your presence at the ...".
Qu'est-ce que c'est? A pair of words which commute and retain the
same meaning? Moreover, that meaning is the same as one word from the
pair (absence) alone! Which leads us to
QUESTION #1: Are there other such word pairs in English?
One comes immediately to mind: existence of your non-existence.
But that's not really fair, is it? After all, "existence" and "presence"
are pseudosynonyms. So,
QUESTION #2: Are all word pairs in answer to #1 necessarily (P,~P) type
words, i.e. do they partition the human experience into 2
mutually exclusive hunks?
QUESTION #3: Why do such pairs imply one of the pair?
QUESTION #4: For every pair, is there a dual pair that implies the other?
(e.g. is there a presence/absence pair that means presence?)
QUESTION #5: Is there a set S of words, |S| > 2, such that they all (or
partially) commute in a phrase, and the phrase implies
some S' an element of S? Or some S' a subset of S?
(What is it that this is?)
I suspect that the answer to #5 is no, since the pairs seem to
have some nature related to the 2-valued logic system under which
English is usually interpreted.
By the way, this is great lunch-time stuff, especially if you are
within ear shot of other people.
Dave Stotts, Univ. of Virginia
(currently) uucp: ...decvax!duke!mcnc!uvacs!pds
(soon may be) uucp: ...decvax!duke!mcnc!ncsu!uvacs!pds
CSnet: pds@uvacs