interlocutor

Reuters

President Obama answers  

his interlocutors among 

  Republican House members 

in Baltimore, Jan. 29, 2010.

[in-ter-LOC-u-tor] 

interlocutor: One who takes part in a dialogue, conversation, or discussion. 

In plural, the persons who carry on a dialogue.—OED

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§ Usage Note:

Interlocutor is part of formal English, hence a word one would find more in print than in daily conversation.

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§ Etymology

1514, from Latin interlocutus, past participle of interloqui "interrupt," from inter- "between" + loqui "speak."—Online Etymology Dictionary

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§ Example Sentences:

I.

"[President Barack Obama] commanded the lectern with the presidential seal and the camera was trained mainly on him, while his interlocutors were forced to look up to him from the audience."—Peter Baker and Carl Hulse. "Off Script, Obama and the G.O.P. Vent Politely," Politics, The New York Times, Jan. 29, 2010.

II.

"As soon as Holden Caulfield remarks to his undefined interlocutor – a psychiatrist? – that he isn’t going to go in for “all that David Copperfield kind of crap”, generation after generation of young readers have fallen in love, and will never quite grow out of it."—Philip Hensher. "JD Salinger: "Reclusive, eccentric author of an undying masterpiece" Telegraph.co.uk, 29 Jan 2010.

III.

Mark McGwire was hailed in some circles last week for coming clean on steroid use. Far from it. McGwire, aside from the basic admission, was about as believable with interlocutor Bob Costas as he was in front of that congressional committee in 2005."—Tim Cronin, southtownstar.com/sports/cronin, Jan. 19, 2010.

IV.

"This book [Cross-Examining Socrates: A Defense of the Interlocutors in Plato's Early Dialogues by John Beversluis] is, by far, the single best-written book about the interlocutors of Socrates as they appear in Plato's dialogues. —Eric Batterson. "A Look At The Losers Of Plato," amazon.com, November 17, 2000.

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§ A Synonym from the Past:

converser: One who converses, or engages in conversation. 

"In dialogue, she was a good converser: her language … was well chosen; … her information varied and correct." Charlotte Bronté, Shirley, xii.—The Century Dictionary (1889).

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§ Scholarly Distinctions Among "interlocutor," "partner," "respondent," and "answerer." 

Example  Sentence IV above comments on the book Cross-Examining Socrates: A Defense of the Interlocutors in Plato's Early Dialogues by John Beversluis, a title that stimulated my curiosity to learn a bit more about how a nuanced meaning of interlocutor could be helpful in understanding the Dialogues.  To my good fortune, amazon.com provides a copy of the opening paragraphs of the book. Within these paragraphs, Beversluis offers us a thoughtful description of the meaning of interlocutor, as well as useful distinctions of intent among the words "interlocutor,"  "partner," "respondent," and "answerer."

For those readers interested learning some scholarly refinements surrounding our word interlocutor, here are those paragraphs.

Chapter I

"The Socratic interlocutor"

The term "interlocutor" is standardly used in referring to the people with whom Socrates converses in the early dialogues.  According to the O.E.D., an interlocutor is "one who takes part in a dialogue, conversation, or discussion" — an etymological definition which slices the term into its Latin derivatives: inter (between) and loquor (to speak).  Interlocutors are people between who  m there is speech; less cumbersomely, they are people who talk to each other.

This does not take us very far.  There are all kinds of conversations and all kinds of interlocutors, though in ordinary language the term is seldom used.  Few would refer to the person with whom they chatted on the morning train as their interlocutor.  It is a stiff and colloquial term, a term that elicits raised eyebrows, suggesting affectation and alerting those within earshot that they are in the presence of a stuffed shirt.  In short, it is a term to be avoided — unless, of course, one is writing about Plato, in which case one can hardly get along without it.

Even some students of Plato reject the term "interlocutor" in favor of less pedantic alternatives like "partner," "respondent," or "answerer."  But these remedial substitutes are equally problematic. "Partner" fosters the illusion of intellectual equality between participants who are, in most cases, spectacularly unequal and, on occasion, mismatched.  "Respondent" errs in the opposite direction by reducing one participant to a completely passive role.  "Answerer" is unsatisfactory too; Socrates' interlocutors do more than answer questions.  What is needed is not a new term or even a better definition of an old term, but an elucidation of the concept of the Socratic interlocutor which clarifies the dialectical and philosophical functions.  Accordingly, I will retain the term "interlocutor."  In spite of its terminological awkwardness, it best captures the announced philosophical goals and methodological principles which underlie the Socratic elenchus* and are allegedly operative throughout the early dialogues.

*Socratic elenchus: the Socratic method of eliciting truth by question and answer, esp. as used to refute an argument—NOAD. Beversluis notes that the term "elenchus" has become permanently entrenched in Anglo-American scholarly parlance." — John Beversluis. Cross-Examining Socrates: A Defense of the Interlocutors in Plato's Early Dialogues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 18

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Cartoons from the website of Neuro-Cognitive Behavioral Communication (NCBC showing the worst and best of what one can expect of the interlocutory process:

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ratiocination

The Ratiocinator or,
 more properly, 
The Thinker,
 bronze sculpture

by Auguste Rodin, 1880; in the

Garden of the Rodin Museum, Paris

SpectrumColourLibrary/Heritage-Images

verb

ratiocinate
[RASH-ee-AHS-i-NATE]

verb [ intrans. ] formal

form judgments by a process of logic; reason.—IOAD

—

noun

Ratiocination is reasoning, the process of exact of logical thinking.

[RASH-ee-AHS-i-NAY-shin.]

The primary stress falls on the penultimate — next to the last — syllable, with lighter accents on the first and third syllables: RASH-ee-AHS-i-NAY-shin. 

—Charles Harrington Elster.  There is No Zoo in Zoology and Other Beastly Mispronunciations. New York: Collier Books, 1988, 127.

COGNATES:

—ratiocinate  v.  [RASH-ee-AHS-i-NATE]

—ratiocinative adj.  [RASH-ee-AHS-i-NA-tive]

—ratiocinator n.  [RASH-ee-AHS-i-NAY-tor]—AHD

ORIGIN:

[Latin ratiocinari, ratiocinat-, from ratio, calculation]  —AHD

RATIOCINATION IN USE:

Robert Downey Jr. as Sherlock Holmes
in Guy Ritchie's film "Sherlock Holmes."

I.

[Sherlock] Holmes's famous ratiocination is now at the service of the man of action. In slow motion, we see the fighting techniques he plans to use against an opponent (he narrates the blows for us, insisting on the logical rightness of each one); then we see his attack again, in lightning-quick flashes.—David Denby, The Current Cinema, "Sherlock Holmes," The New Yorker, Jan. 4 2010, 76.

II.

Obama needs to craft a strong story, and fast, if he expects to be able to accomplish anything in the three years that remain. His opponents are hard at work smithing their stories, and Obama soon might find himself surrounded on all sides by crude powerful tales that no amount of ratiocination will be able to dispel. The President needs to remember his post’s true vocation: that of the Storyteller-in-Chief.—Junot Diaz"One Year: Storyteller-in-Chief," January 20, 2010  (newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk).

III.

For all their vaunted powers of ratiocination, grand masters of chess tend to be a skittery lot. – “People”, Time (clutchmagonline.com)

Portrait of Edgar Allan Poe

nytimes.com/slide show

IV.

mm"These tales of ratiocination," Edgar Allan Poe explained to a correspondent in 1846, "owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key." He was referring to the three stories he wrote in the early 1840s featuring C. Auguste Dupin—"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" (1842-3), and "The Purloined Letter" (1841). The "new key" was, of course, what we have come to call "detective fiction." . . . .

mmBut . . . Poe never conceived of the Dupin stories as belonging to the genre of detective fiction; he never referred to them as such. Rather he used the term "tales of ratiocination" in order to emphasize the delineation of a chain of logical reasoning and analysis. For him, the detective was not the central focus of the story, but a vehicle for tracing a train of thought, and the tale itself a way to analyze, "that moral activity which disentangles" as he writes in his prefatory comments to "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." It was an interest in logic and not in the personality of the fictional detective that led Poe to write his detective fiction. He left it to others, notably Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to explore the character of the detective, of which his deductive methods would be but one facet.—Stephen Rachman, "Edgar Alan Poe and the Origins of Mystery Fiction (strandmag.com/poe.htm)

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THE HEART OF RATIOCINATION: THE SYLLOGISM


In A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, John Stuart Mills asserted the essential    connection between ratiocination and the syllogism: "There is a [narrow] sense, in which the name reasoning is confined to the form of inference which is termed ratiocination, and of which the syllogism is the general type."

Remember the syllogism in Composition and Rhetoric 101?  If not, read on.

The first one I ever deliberately learned was

mmAll men are mortal.

mmSocrates is a man.

mmTherefore, Socrates is mortal.

The three sentences made simple, obvious sense, and I thought no more about them.  I was then quite surprised, in my undergraduate naivete, to learn that someone actually had to invent such an arrangement of words and sentences, as well as phalanxes of rules to support it.

I learned that each of the statements had a name:

mmMajor premise: All humans are mortal.

mmMinor premise: Socrates is a human.

mmConclusion: Therefore Socrates is mortal.

I learned how the syllogism could be rendered symbolically using the alphabet, like this

a = b

\

c = a

c = b

and how critical it was that the a's, b's, and c's  all appear in the order presented here,  the two a's aligned in crosswise position, making it possible to equate c with b.

I then wondered who it was that had invented such a powerful design for reason.

Before long, I learned that "[t]he oldest surviving writing to explicitly consider the rules by which reason operates," as Wikipedia recounts it,

are the works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, especially Prior Analysis and Posterior Analysis. Although the Ancient Greeks had no separate word for logic as distinct from language and reason, Aristotle's newly coined word "syllogism" (syllogismos) identified logic clearly for the first time as a distinct field of study. When Aristotle referred to "the logical" (hê logikê), he was referring more broadly to rational thought,

or ratiocination.

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In closing, I offer this syllogism of my own making in homage to the form's brilliant inventor:

The inventor of the syllogism can rightly be called the Founder of Ratiocination.

Aristotle invented the syllogism.

Therefore, Aristotle can rightly be called the Founder of Ratiocination.

Ratiocinator in Chief:
Aristotle. A detail from the fresco
The School of Athens by Raphael.
gap-systems.org

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feckless, feck

  Arianna Huffington's

 book about becoming

 a political liberal.

hachettebookgroup.com  

A conservative

critic's mocking 

  response to 

Huffington's 

 book. 
SaberPoint stogiechomper@gmail.com  

[FEK-less]  adj.


feckless

   

1. (of a person) lacking in efficiency or vitality : a feckless mama's boy.

2. unthinking and irresponsible : the feckless exploitation of the world's natural resources.—NOAD

IN USE

"Our professorial president is no feckless W., biking through Katrina."—Maureen Dowd, NYTimes,  OP-ED, "Captain Obvious Learns the Limits of Cool," Jan. 9, 2010.

"Yet if presidents have accrued too much power, if the Congress is feckless, if the national security bureaucracy is irretrievably broken, the American people have only themselves to blame."—Daniel Johnson, America:a nation of "Damned Fools,"  Salem news.com, Jan. 1, 2010.

RELATED WORDS

fecklessly (FEK-lis-lee) adverb; fecklessness (FEK-lis-nis) noun.

ORIGIN

Eugene Ehrlick in The Highly Selective Dictionary of Golden Adjectives for the Extraordinarily Literate narrates the following etymology for feckless:

From Scottish and northern English feck, meaning "effect," + -less, an adjectival suffix meaning "without," thus "without effect."

Which makes one wonder whether there is also a feckful and, as it turns out, there once was a feckful in Scottish and in the English spoken in England's north. It meant "efficient, powerful."  Apparently, nothing beats being full of feck." (New York: HarperCollins, 2002.)

MEANWHILE, IN IRELAND . . . 
During recent years the Irish have been not at all feckless in their open use of the exclamatory phrase "feck off," which, of course, sounds very much like the expletive "f*ck off."  There is no semantic connection  between feckless and feck, other than the words' obvious shared syllable, "feck." In point of fact, the Irish imperative feck  derives from the expletive f*ck,  which, the OED tells us "remains (and has been for centuries) one of the English words most avoided as taboo."


After I learned about a recent dust-up in Ireland over public use of feck — as in "feck off," "you feck," and "feckin' 'ell"— I just could not resist sharing with you the following account.


I discovered that the Irish have collectively created a quasi-benign meaning for feck and during recent years have supported its rising incidence in print and speech.


Feck in this snarly sense bloomed in popularity on the Irish isles during the past decade largely because of its repeated use by the characters of a popular UK television situation comedy  named "Father Ted," which enjoyed a three year run in the late 1990s.

 

 Father Ted as portrayed

 by actor Dermot Morgan  

Eventually, the exclamatory phrase "feck off" appeared on an advertising poster for Mangers Irish Cider, upsetting a group of parents who wanted to protect their children from needless encounters with the word. The group filed a complaint with the UK's Advertising Standards Authority.

Following is the outcome of that complaint as described by The Daily Record on Dec. 10, 2008:

Headline: 'Feck' is not swearing, say advertising watchdogs

IT'S OK to use the word "feck" in conversation - thanks to Father Ted. Watchdogs have decided it is not a swearword after probing complaints about its use on a poster for cider.

The Advertising Standards Authority received a complaint after a Magners advert showed an orchard keeper saying: "Feck off bees."The Irish firm insisted he was merely issuing "a mild rebuff" - and not cursing. Feck has been around in various forms in Ireland since the early 1800s. And it was made famous in phrases such as "feck off" and "feckin' eejit" in the 90s sitcom Father Ted. In particular, drunken priest Father Jack, played by actor Frank Kelly, used it liberally to replace the other F-word.

And as they refused to uphold the complaint, the regulators said: "The use of the word feck in Britain has been popularised by TV programmes such as Father Ted. "We considered that the tone of the ad was not aggressive or threatening. "The term feck was unlikely to be seen as a swearword." It claimed the use of the word would not offend adults and was not unsuitable to be seen by children either. 

The blogger at Swordplay posed and answered (aptly, in my view) a provocative rhetorical question about the appropriateness of the ASA's decision, to wit:

A feckless disregard for decency, or an informed take on the Protean nature of language? We’re opting for the latter. (Swordplay www.spada.co.uk Dec. 10, 2008.)

Finally, for the record, I should note that the Irish also use feck informally in three nonexclamatory senses: (1) "to steal" (e.g. 'They had fecked cash out of the rector's room'); or (2) "to throw" (e.g. 'He's got no manners at all.  I asked him nicely for the remote control, and he fecked it across the table at me.'); or (3) "to leave hastily" (e.g. "He's after feckin off down the road when he saw the shades!") —Wikipedia.

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For a YouTube stream of scenes presenting "Father Ted" characters declaiming "feck" phrases, click here: Father Ted - Holy Swearing.

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Even on welcome mats.  

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risible

Disney image

rizible  [rĭz'ə-bəl]  adj.

1. Relating to laughter or used in eliciting laughter.

2. Eliciting laughter; ludicrous.

3. Capable of laughing or inclined to laugh.—AHD

rizibility  [rĭz'ə-bĭl'-ĭ-tē]  noun  plural -ties

1. The ability or tendency to laugh.

2. A sense of the ludicrous or amusing. Often used in the plural.

3. Laughter; hilarity—AHD

IN USE

risible adj.

"[James] Cameron* still has trouble with (or maybe just no interest in) writing a script that isn’t riddled with action-movie clichés, risible villains and ham-fisted foreshadowings. *Director of the movie "Avatar." — Steve Ponds, thewrap.com, Dec. 17, 2009.

risibility noun

WFB [William F. Buckley Jr.] was very proud of his son, as well he should have been. Christopher Buckley continues the legacy of Buckley wit and increases my risibility index with every reading. —From goodreads.com, Johnny's review of Little Green Men: A Novel, Random House Inc.  

risibilities noun

"Risibilities support us as we skim over the surface of a deep issue." — J. A. Pike —WIII

risibles noun

"Unable to control her risibles, Lady Grimley guffawed after Count Erple punctuated the silence with a hiccup."—J.H.

ORIGIN

Mid 16th cent. (in the sense [inclined to laughter] ): from late Latin risibilis, from Latin ris- ‘laughed,’ from the verb ridere.—OAD

SYNONYMS

risible adj. a risible comedy routine from their old radio days;

laughable, ridiculous, absurd, comical, comic, amusing, hilarious, humorous, droll, farcical, silly, ludicrous, hysterical, informal rib-tickling, priceless —OAWT

COMMENT

As as my modest attempt at risibility above about Lady Grimley strives to illustrate, risibile, as Webster's III of 1928 tells us, is sometimes used as a plural noun, "for muscles and other organs used in laughing," as in, for example, "one's being unable to control one's risibles." Granted, risibles in this sense is somewhat dated, but it can still be useful, especially with a nimble audience already familiar with the word. A standup comedian might say after telling a joke that prompted more laughter than she had anticipated, "A hah! That one tickled your risibles!"

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