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Fwd: Solids and surds
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--- Forwarded message from bunsan@direcway.com -----
Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2005 20:24:11 -0500
From: Alexander Drescher <bunsan@direcway.com>
Don and List-
Would someone explain the general opposition of solids and surds, and
how the latter applies to the scholars in question [Pnin, Vintage p41]?
"There are human solids and there are human surds, and Clements and
Pnin belonged to the latter variety."
Many thanks.
Sandy Drescher
----- End forwarded message -----
EDNOTE. The basic source for all things "Pninian" for the fictional hero is
Gennadi Barabtarlo's _PHANTOM OF Fact: A Guide to Nabokov's Pnin_ where we find
the entry "Another one of the series of slightly paradoxical maxims
scattered throughout the book. Both terms oare mathematical: the latter
approximately means "irrational" (the numeri surdi,"muffled" or rather "dull"
numbers, as the medieval mathematicians used to call such imponderables as the
square root of two) and goes back to Arabic (via Latin and Greek.)
p. 94.