Stan Kelly-Bootle still detects "some terminological
confusion.What makes linguistics (and semantics in particular) so exasperating
is that we must use language to discuss and explain language....s1 -> S1
[Noise of Nabokovian feet rushing for the EXIT! Wait. Ti postoi, krasavista
moya!]
There are plausible neurocognitive reasons why rhymes and puns
are so appealing. Briefly: as we scan/parse incoming text-streams (written or
spoken) we are continually (subconsciously) forming hypotheses, anticipating,
filling gaps — triggering myriad migdet-swarms in adjacent clusters of neurons —
hearing “Am I my brother’s ...” has already triggered “keeper” before the
arrival of KIPPER; one imagines a resulting minor fire-storm of synaptic
giggles.".
JM: As I suspected, although the Bard concludes
that "life is a stage", articulate art always signifies
something.
As I had not suspected, jokes depend on an expected (silent
and failed) meaning: it seems there's not a chance of any true cosmic laughter
after all!
HH wrote: "Unless it can be proven to me — to me as I am
now, today, with my heart and by beard, and my putrefaction — that in the
infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named
Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless
this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see
nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local
palliative of articulate art."