An Open Love Letter

I am not disenchanted with the word. If it were not for the particular mix of it being insider speak (no wine geek uses the word) and based on grammatical and biological ignorance, I probably would mind less. Neither insider speak nor ignorance by itself is terrible, but the two together are, as I said on another bored about this, toxic. Join the fight to stamp out this atrocity and instead invent good neologisms and portmanteaus that do something for the language rather than degrade it. I, for one, have long thought that insinuendo by now should be in the OED.
 
Using "varietal" to refer to a variety of a grape is a form of wine geek technobabble based on ignorance of how the words are used.
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I have a self-programmable shock collar that activates with incorrect usage of the word. It really is handy and if I were more industrious I would patent it.

Otherwise, I know I have raised the ire of many ITB comrades when correcting them. On days when this happens, I sleep like a baby at night. A drooling, infantile baby. But a baby nonetheless.

Double otherwise, I still pride myself on coming within two chapters of finishing my doctoral dissertation without ever fully reading a "Critique" by Kant. Post-structuralism gets all the hotties after all...

Mmmm, hotties...
 
It does seem fitting that a thread that began as a love letter to WD quickly turned into a smackdown over variety vs. varietal. Must be a fruit day.
 
originally posted by John Ritchie:
It does seem fitting that a thread that began as a love letter to WD quickly turned into a smackdown over variety vs. varietal
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originally posted by Roger LaMarque:
I want to take a moment to thank the people who fill this board with content
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Or maybe it's because the people here tend to fill this board with discontent...

-Eden (and it's not even winter)
 
"Given all the various words that have come into being due to usage in the wine world e.g. meritage, it seems reasonable to accept "varietal" as well."

"varietal" is just another lowly (yet acceptable) adjective. "meritage" is a protected trademark. use sparingly, with caution, and not in direct sunlight.

from wikipedia (just so that veracity of this quote is not called into question, you know):

"Meritage is a proprietary term used to denote red and white Bordeaux-style wines without infringing on the Bordeaux (France) region's legally protected designation of origin. Winemakers must license the Meritage trademark from its owner, the California-based Meritage Alliance. Member wineries are found principally in the United States, though increasingly elsewhere."
 
originally posted by Marc Hanes:
Varie... Ooowwww!
Using "varietal" to refer to a variety of a grape is a form of wine geek technobabble based on ignorance of how the words are used.
Click to expand...

I have a self-programmable shock collar that activates with incorrect usage of the word. It really is handy and if I were more industrious I would patent it.

Otherwise, I know I have raised the ire of many ITB comrades when correcting them. On days when this happens, I sleep like a baby at night. A drooling, infantile baby. But a baby nonetheless.

Double otherwise, I still pride myself on coming within two chapters of finishing my doctoral dissertation without ever fully reading a "Critique" by Kant. Post-structuralism gets all the hotties after all...

Mmmm, hotties...
Click to expand...

How does one read post-structuralism without knowing Kant? It's sort of like starting War and Peace in the middle.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
originally posted by Marc Hanes:
Varie... Ooowwww!
Using "varietal" to refer to a variety of a grape is a form of wine geek technobabble based on ignorance of how the words are used.
Click to expand...

I have a self-programmable shock collar that activates with incorrect usage of the word. It really is handy and if I were more industrious I would patent it.

Otherwise, I know I have raised the ire of many ITB comrades when correcting them. On days when this happens, I sleep like a baby at night. A drooling, infantile baby. But a baby nonetheless.

Double otherwise, I still pride myself on coming within two chapters of finishing my doctoral dissertation without ever fully reading a "Critique" by Kant. Post-structuralism gets all the hotties after all...

Mmmm, hotties...
Click to expand...

How does one read post-structuralism without knowing Kant? It's sort of like starting War and Peace in the middle.
Click to expand...

Useful but not essential, maybe, at least for anthropologists and those in related disciplines, where structuralism begins with Levi-Strauss and discussions of post-structuralism fix on Derrida and Foucault with long looks at others.

I think these terms do not mean exactly the same thing in anthro and literary studies, or at least have differing emphases.
 
How does one read post-structuralism without knowing Kant? It's sort of like starting War and Peace in the middle.
Click to expand...

Hell, I skipped to the last two chapters of War & Peace and even that wore me out.

Anyway, thank goodness for Blackwell or Routledge anthologies, you never have to read nothing for real! Besides, during my philosophy undergrad at Columbia profs were more interested in Frege than Kant, doctoral work at Fordham profs were more interested in St. Thomas than Kant. If not Aquinas, most of them were stinkin' Hegelians.

Tell the hotties you are into Hume or Kant and you get dissed. Tell 'em you belong to two Nietzsche societies and know Andrew Ross and you get play and maybe a free 8-ball. At least that's how it was back in tha day.
 
originally posted by Doug Padgett:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
originally posted by Marc Hanes:
Varie... Ooowwww!
Using "varietal" to refer to a variety of a grape is a form of wine geek technobabble based on ignorance of how the words are used.
Click to expand...

I have a self-programmable shock collar that activates with incorrect usage of the word. It really is handy and if I were more industrious I would patent it.

Otherwise, I know I have raised the ire of many ITB comrades when correcting them. On days when this happens, I sleep like a baby at night. A drooling, infantile baby. But a baby nonetheless.

Double otherwise, I still pride myself on coming within two chapters of finishing my doctoral dissertation without ever fully reading a "Critique" by Kant. Post-structuralism gets all the hotties after all...

Mmmm, hotties...
Click to expand...

How does one read post-structuralism without knowing Kant? It's sort of like starting War and Peace in the middle.
Click to expand...

Useful but not essential, maybe, at least for anthropologists and those in related disciplines, where structuralism begins with Levi-Strauss and discussions of post-structuralism fix on Derrida and Foucault with long looks at others.

I think these terms do not mean exactly the same thing in anthro and literary studies, or at least have differing emphases.
Click to expand...

Post-structuralism should mean the same thing in anthro and lit. Lit. generally starts as well with Derrida on structuralists, with L-S having a certain priority because of the discussion of Triste Tropiques in de la gr. Still, without a fair understanding of Plato, Kant and Hegel, it's really not possible to understand what Derrida means by self-presence and the shift it represented in philosophy, which is a matter of some concern in some key pages introducing the reading of L-S and Rousseau. I don't even know how one could decipher the section on the Death of Man in Order of Things without knowing how Foucault thinks the Kantian cogito differs from Descartes. Of course a lot of nonsense has been written about a lot of post structuralists. Probably if one tried to write an analysis of War and Peace based on the second half and reading Cliff notes, one would come out in a similar place on that book.
 
I'm with Graeme on this: it's an adjective, not a noun.

I was surprised to learn that "meritage" rhymes with "heritage".

Oh, excuse me.

I was surprised to learn that {[('`"meritage"`')]} rhymes with heritage.
 
originally posted by Marc Hanes:
Read? Who the hell reads anymore?
How does one read post-structuralism without knowing Kant? It's sort of like starting War and Peace in the middle.
Click to expand...

Tell the hotties you are into Hume or Kant and you get dissed. Tell 'em you belong to two Nietzsche societies and know Andrew Ross and you get play and maybe a free 8-ball. At least that's how it was back in tha day.
Click to expand...

There seems to be a contradiction here since Nietzsche certainly knew his Kant and is considerably less envigorating and amusing if you don't. And, from what I can tell from reading him, Andrew Ross knows all of them. Not liking Hume shows at least bad taste. With Nietzsche and Hobbes, among the best writers of philosophy. Maybe you need to pursue a different style of hotty.
 
originally posted by Ian Fitzsimmons:
Jonathan: are Kant-knowledgeable? Is there a good German-language edition of 'Kritik' easily available in the U.S.?

Danke.
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Can't parse the first sentence. Most decent academic libraries have the standard edition of the Werke I would think. I don't read German, so I don't keep track. Of which Kritik are we speaking, by the way?
 
originally posted by Ian Fitzsimmons:
Sorry, the word 'you' got lost somehow. Pure reason. Thought you were a German-speaker for some reason, probably impure.
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The answer to the first question is that, if knowledgeable means having read the stuff, I'm pretty Kant knowledgeable in English. I've read the 3 Critiques and the usual other stuff that most people who haven't read the Critiques get in College if they take a philosophy course. I'm better on the 1st and 3rd than on the 2nd and much better on the 3rd, which I've read in the 3 translations I know of and, with the help of informants, have checked against the original and learned the German equivalences of various of the terms. But I don't read German and have had to deal with that as people with disabilities do.
 
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