For the academics

[FrodeauxB at aol.com]

Just wonder if this is what the plist scholars should do or are doing.
>From Diary by Stanley Fish(OOOOOOH, bet he's going to draw a flame or two) in 
the 1-14-00 edition of slate:
The other moment of pleasure came to me when I was listening to a
lecture by a job candidate, a statistician so sophisticated that I
barely understood a word he was saying until he turned his
attention to the thesis of another scholar. So and so, he said,
says this, "but then he caveats it all over the place." Here was a
double pleasure: first, in hearing someone transform a noun into a
verb at once casually and effectively (everyone understood what he
meant; so and so said something, but then qualified it so many ways
that the assertion became exceedingly thin); but second, and even
more pleasurable, a recognition that this wonderful piece of
grammatically wayward prose accurately named what scholars in every
discipline routinely do. We hazard a bold assertion and then we
surround it with reservations, footnotes, acknowledgments of
alternative hypotheses, and other varieties of waffling and
weaseling. In short, we caveat it all over the place. In the space
of about 20 seconds, I became so enamored of this phrase that I
decided to invent a new school of criticism, the
caveat-it-all-over-the-place school, already of course the school
every one of us belongs to, but not yet, till this moment, properly
labeled.

You'll have to go to slate yourself to find out his other moment of pleasure.


frodeauxb
Women and cats will do as they please and men and dogs should relax and get 
used to the idea.--Robert A. Heinlein