GRGRGR:poor Zipf

[Craig Clark]

John Mascaro writes:

> No doubt, though GR's use of things Zipfian raises some interesting questions on 
> the book's chronology.  To my knowledge the actual expression--Principle of Least 
> Effort--wasn't used by Zipf until the 1949 book.  But more interesting to me when I 
> actually read this book is the very bizarre drift of Zipf's thought.  This Principle of 
> Least Effort he uncovered gradually became his total obsession, and the 1949 book 
> absolutely crosses a line (a Mason-Dixon line?), blending statistics with paranoia as 
> Zipf--not sounding at all like a statistician--pleads to the reader that his Principle 
> lays bare nothing less than the secret structure of all social relations--not just 
> linguistic, but economic, political. etc.  He waxes utopian about the explanatory 
> power of the Principle.  But then gets really weird, a strange note creeps in, just like 
> the one that creeps into Gennaro's performance of THE COURIER's TRAGEDY. 
> Zipf starts talking about (I'm going from memory here; this was in my diss) the 
> injustices visited upon him by jealous rivals and the forces of repression generally, 
> forces which DO NOT WANT knowledge of the principle  to be disseminated.  For 
> a lover of TRP, reading the Zipf book is an amazing experience--as the reverse 
> echoes start sliding up and down your brain.  I'd bet a dollar our man immersed 
> himself in this book, and found , natch, a way to incorporate an entire lost history 
> (Zipf firmly believed he had revolutionized EVERY area of human inquiry; that all 
> social research would be altered permanently;  and that this fact would be 
> self-evident to anyone who understood the Principle) into what to many readers 
> must seem like a toss off comment or two exploiting an unknown guy's funny, and 
> probably fictitious, name.

Sounds a bit like the late Sigmund Freud, at least as far as E M 
Thornton was concerned (go browse the archives from about two weeks 
back when we were discussing the Adenoid for my comments on this...)

Craig Clark

"Living inside the system is like driving across
the countryside in a bus driven by a maniac bent
on suicide."
   - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"