« a provocation is what teaching is | Main | learning by heart »
March 18, 2010
our common parlance
We still speak of ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset.’ We do so as if the Copernican model of the solar system had not replaced, ineradicably, the Ptolemaic. Vacant metaphors, eroded figures of speech, inhabit our vocabulary and grammar. They are caught, tenaciously, in the scaffolding and recesses of our common parlance. There they rattle about like old rags or ghosts in the attic.
George Steiner
Posted by amin at March 18, 2010 6:31 AM