My Stuff

https://umass-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/rwolff_umass_edu/EkxJV79tnlBDol82i7bXs7gBAUHadkylrmLgWbXv2nYq_A?e=UcbbW0

Coming Soon:

The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."





Total Pageviews

Tuesday, August 5, 2014

DUMPSTER DIVING


It is just barely possible that readers of this blog have formed the opinion that I am a high-minded type who occupies himself with eternal questions and the deeper meanings of otherwise incomprehensible books.  The purpose of this brief blog post is to disabuse anyone who has been thus misled.

I was idly surfing the web, reading some of my favorite blogs to see what was going on in the world, when I came upon a story about Kim Kardashian.  I am of course familiar with the name, and might even be able to pick her out of a police line-up, but I reflected that I knew absolutely nothing about her except that she is famous.  This led me to Wikipedia's entry on Kim Kardashian, who, it seems, is the daughter of now deceased lawyer Robert Kardashian.  I actually recall Robert Kardashian as one of O. J. Simpson's lawyers in the trial of the century.  Kim Kardashian, who is now thirty-three, has married Kanye West, with whom she has a daughter named [I am not making any of this up!] North West.  I assume that if the daughter makes it to puberty and conceives a child, the child will, if it is a girl, be named North by North West, and will in turn grow up to star in a remake of the classic Hitchcock film of that name.

The phrase "famous for being famous," Wikipedia tells me [yes, there is a Wikipedia entry on "famous for being famous."  Take that, Encyclopedia Britannica!] was apparently coined by Daniel Boorstin, a fact that pleases me for some obscure reason.

The concept, if not the term, "famous for being famous" has given rise to semi-synonyms, one of which is "celebutante."  This, Wikipedia explains without further attribution, is a portmanteau word.  It was of course Lewis Carroll who invented the term "portmanteau word" to explain such classic neologisms from The Hunting of the Snark as "frumious," which is "furious" and "fuming" scrunched together by someone who cannot decide which term should precede the other.  Lewis Carroll, by the way, under his real name Charles Dodgson, was a maths don in Christ Church, Oxford, who did some lovely work expanding on Condorcet's "paradox of majority rule" [see my In Defense of Anarchism for a brief exposition of the paradox.]   He was also the author of some spectacularly funny [and quite valid] ratiocinatio polysyllogistica.

I think this is enough to put to rest rumors of my intellectual sophistication.

4 comments:

David Auerbach said...

Dover, of course, has republished many of Carroll's puzzle books and they are worth buying.
I always thought that
Definition of celebrity: someone well-known for being famous
was pretty old, though not Bierce.
For him, see
http://tinyurl.com/bl8h83

Aldo Antonelli said...

And of course 'portmanteau' is autological.

Robert Paul Wolff said...

Is it really? I would have thought "panteau" would be, but not portmanteau, which, after all, simply means "coat carrier," hence luggage.

mesnenor said...

"Celebutante" is merely a euphemism for "celebutard".