I found this footnote about Shakespeare's character Falstaff in Burke's "Four Master Tropes". I would consider Falstaff a gloriously ironic conception because we are so at one with him in his vices, while he himself embodies his vices in a mode of identification or brotherhood that is all but religious. Falstaff would not simply rob a man, from without. He identifies himself with the victim of a theft; he represents the victim. He would not crudely steal a purse; rather, he joins forces with the owner of the purse -- and it is only when the harsh realities of this imperfect world have imposed a brutally divisive clarity upon the situation, that Falstaff is left holding the purse. He produces a new quality, a state of synthesis or merger -- and it so happens that, when this synthesis is finally dissociated again into its analytic components (the crudities of the realm of practical property relationships having reduced this state of qualitative merger to a stat
One of my coauthors described his participation in a psychology experiment where he was supposed to navigate a maze of some kind. But, as with most psychology experiments, the question wasn't whether he would make it through the maze, but something else. Namely, the experimenter wanted to see how many times, as well as, presumably, when, and where, the research subject said "um" and "ah" when tracing through the maze. The only problem was that my coauthor was very slow and deliberate in his tracing, so he never said "um" or "ah" and had to be ruled out from the dataset as an "outlier." It occurs to me that "um" and "ah" ("filler" words in linguistics terms) might be usable examples of phatics, a bit similar to the example of applause that we talked about recently. I suspect that - outliers like my colleague notwithstanding - some interesting psycholinguistics work has been done to describe the func