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Dictionary Lesson (Free verse) by Dovina When I said, âI love you,â
and soon realized its reciprocal, âYou love me,â
and its result, âWe are in love,â
and much later, with its contrary, âI donât love you,â
and finally its opposite, âI hate you,â
and when, after a long hiatus,
its many reverses blured into,
âI have no feeling for you,â
I realized my dictionary is a history,
written ahead of fact,
a compendium of devolution.
Up the ladder:
Hurt
Down the ladder:
You have 7 hours to live... now here's the bad news
Votes: (green: user, blue: anonymous)
Arithmetic Mean: 3.8
Posted: November 16, 2004 7:38 AM PST; Last modified: November 16, 2004 3:29 PM PSTWeighted score: 4.8569565 Overall Rank: 10481 The following users have marked this poem on their favorites list:
Comments:
BIG FAT WOW.
Psh
The T-word irritates me, I find the idea of poets (or anyone) saying what truth is a bit pretentious. The F-word in the penultimate line, the same. As for 'converse' maybe use reciprocal or something like that.
I don't know if you meant this, but it reads as though there is no object of your 'love' but rather you are just transforming the phrase I love you.
The object is "you" - him.
I was wrong about reciprocal. The first two lines are premises leading onto the third line. Line 2 does not lead on from line 1. Probably need to make clear that 'i hate you' and 'i have no feelings for you' are new premises and not part of 'i love you' too.
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This will make the approximately the millionth time the following message has been posted on poemranker.
.....
1) The converse of "I love you" is not "You love me". Its converse is nothing, or at best "If something is you, then I love that thing," since converses are mainly useful for altering if/then expressions.
2) None of the three main transformations (converse, inverse, contrapositive) can transform "I love you" into "you love me".
When beset by doubt,
Run in little circles,
Wave your arms and shout.
i call this masterpieve 'Panic', and it was written by me. :D
1) Do you mean "realized" in the second line to mean anything specific? Or just like, you saw that he loved you too?
2) Opposite and contrary are the same thing.
3) "I don't love you" is the opposite/contrary of "I love you", not, as you have it, "I hate you".
4) This whole poem kind of presumes that a thing necessarily leads into its reciprocal, contrary or whatever. Now, before you go shooting off, of course it doesn't say that outright. But things wouldn't seem like such a "compendium of devolution" if you'd just said, as I often do,
When I said, "I love her,"
I thought about the converse: "If somebody is she, I love that person," which is true.
And the inverse: "If I don't love somebody, then that person is not she," which is not necessarily true.
And the contrapositive: "If somebody isn't she, then I don't love that person," which is also not necessarily true.
And I saw the reciprocal of the original proposition: "she loves me,"
And the result was something like "We love each other."
And then I restated the original proposition, squared: "No, I love you, squared."
And she said, "No, I love you times infinity"
Et cetera et cetera.
5) Most of your problem is using the word "realized" in line 2. Yes, surely you mean "realized" in the sense that an ambitious guy "realizes" his potential or dreams or something. OR DID YOU???! But it isn't the word for the situation and it butches everything up. It makes it seem like all the transformations just follow the proposition, which is of course not the case. Besides, it's not even grammatical to say "realized ... with its contrary" (as you have).
6) You misspelled blurred.
7) Everything after that is worse. A nice idea, your dictionary being your history or whatever, but the way you have it is kind of preposterous and self-absorbed.
In fact, that will probably help with your last utterly ballsed line, too. A compendium of devolution???! For one thing, all the words you've picked out of the dictionary (reciprocal, result, contrary, opposite, reverses) don't of themselves make a devolution (cf, my example above, which only devolves into goopy smarm). They don't make a good poem about dictionaries, either, but that's not the point.
Secondly, if those words do make your life seem like a devolution, it might be because you've missed all these really ace words that are also in the dictionary (like "teleport" and "anti-gravity machine") and have nothing to do with devolution.
Thirdly, compendium and devolution are balls words to use in a poem. And this whole poem is based on your half-formed notion that anything transformed or described with big words is necessarily worse for it. Which is balls.
You're going to say I've proved that with my overanalysis here.
Balls. Your poem was bad before.
4. The difference between your example and my poem is the same as between all of your smug flaunting of logical correctness and my stretching of life metaphorically beyond your limits of feeling. Need I say that yours is all a kind of math, supposedly connected by reason, whereas mine relates felt life in unusual ways. When I say my dictionary is a compendium of devolution, you complain, and when I say it records my history before I lived it, you complain. And your objections are trivial logic without a shred of life.
Last time, you fell back on your education, this time on stoicism, contortions of language, extreme arogance, and not a trace of kindness. Your education is of no more interset to me than your complexion or the way you walk. Your written words are all that matter here. You must be a hard man to live with, Mr. Zodiac.
The consequences are being sellotaped to a bulging scarecrow in the middle of the night and being forced to compete in a staring contest with him until one of you fills your shorts.
Would you not agree that your poem would be more impressive if it made philosophical/logical sense, and conveyed the "feeling" which you wish to achieve? I don't see why you couldn't, except for a knee jerking reaction against DA and Zodiac.
As has been discussed on this site innumerable times there is a big difference between good emotions and good poetry.
2) The diametric opposite of "I love you" is still "I don't love you", the same way the diametric opposite of, say, "object X is a square" isn't "object X is a circle"; it's "object X is not a square." Whatever the hell you mean by diametric. Even richa says so below.
3) Since you're using dictionary.com, try this: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q
4) Your a turd. How's that for logical correctness? Language is mathmatical, and math is a language. Being a math undergrad for three years taught me to use language more precisely, in a way being an English major for seven years never did. And need I say you couldn't convincingly relate the experience of a turd to a turdbowl? What you imagine is the "life" related in your poems is only intelligible to yourself, and only glancingly so.
5) Again, this poem is trying to be a philosophy/math poem. You've filled it up with philosophy gobble which you don't get. When we held you to the standards you set for it by doing so, you said "oh no, it isn't a philosophy poem, it's felt life." Bow'ls.
6) Answer my fucking point about the "history written ahead of the fact." All you've said is I'm complaining about it. Well, duh!
1) Since we're talking about an imaginary transformation, it's not like it fucking matters, but if I were told to reverse all the terms of "x > 1", I would answer "1 < x". The statement "I love you" is roughly equivalent.
2) One would be tempted to say the opposite of "a Negro man" is "a White man". Unfortunately, no one but the most floundering duff would say something like that. For one thing, it implies a polarity between Negro Man and White Man which doesn't really exist. The real opposite of "a Negro man" is "a non-Negro Man".
Look at it this way: The statement "I love you" can easily be rewritten as "The statement 'I love you' is true". What's the diametric opposite of that? ANSWER: "The statement 'I love you' is false", or "I don't love you."
3) What's so fucking hard to understand about the following?
con·trar·y ( P ) Pronunciation Key (kntrr)
adj.
Opposed, as in character or purpose
...
Opposite in direction or position: Our boat took a course contrary to theirs. See Synonyms at opposite.
...
Something that is opposite or contrary.
Either of two opposing or contrary things:
...
Ergo, the words "reciprocal", "contrary", "opposite" and "reverses" as used in your poem are expressing THE EXACT SAME THING!!!
4) Ibid.
5) Ibid.
6) "My dictionary, read in the feeling of the time, is..." means something totally different from "I realized my dictionary is...". In fact, that's more-or-less the revision suggestion I made earlier. I'm not arguing your meaning, I'm arguing that what you said in the poem is different from your meaning. You've essentially just agreed.
7) I agree that my last couple of poem are pretty feelingless. I've been trying for something different and not acheiving it. Before that, my posts kick your posts' asses. Anyway, you're just saying that because I don't "feel" your poems. BUT ISN'T THERE ANOTHER POSSIBILITY???!?! THAT YOUR POEMS AREN'T VERY GOOD AT RELATING FEELING?!!?! YES!!!!!!
8) I count only two "reverses" in this poem: from "I love you" to "you love me", and from "I love you" to "I don't love (or hate) you". Ergo, your going on about "its many reverses" is a load of guff. Ergo, you're something like saying "Earlier it was light, but now it's dark. I have a hangover. My experience of the world is an unending devolution." Bow'ls.
"What are you doing?" I asked, when she'd finally tired out enough to listen.
"I'm playing baseball," she answered.
"No you're not," I said. "Baseball is played with a stick and a ball. We're playing baseball."
"That's not my understanding of baseball. Mine is running around bases and faeces. What authority do you have to say your game is baseball and mine isn't?" she said, surprisingly articulately, which made us think she'd probably picked up the phrase somewhere else.
"Well," I said. "We invented the game. We have umpires and coaches who tell us what is baseball and what isn't."
"I reject your umpires," she answered pertly. "Besides, umpires don't even play baseball. They just watch and comment. How are they to know what's baseball and what isn't? When I rub myself with faeces and run bases, I FEEL that I'm playing baseball. What have your umpires got to compare with that?"
"They INVENTED the game!" I shouted, getting a little exasperated. "The definition of baseball is 'A sport played with sticks and balls and approved by umpires'!"
"Poot!" she said. "Rules! Correctness! No one would have any fun playing your baseball, adhering to rules and logic and authorities! The fun is all that matters to me!"
"Look," I said, lowering my voice a little (for the Negroes were getting a little frightened, in that way Negroes do sometimes), "Baseball is one of the most popular sports in the world. Tons of people have fun playing it, rules and all. Now, Lord knows you can play whatever kind of game you want. But why don't you just call it something other than baseball? And try not playing it on a BASEBALL field?"
"I WANT it to be baseball!" she answered. "No, I don't know where I got the idea that it was baseball. I was just rubbing myself with faeces one day when the word just came to me: Baseball."
We could tell she was getting worked up again, her faeces-caked eyes kind of aglow with a weird stupid light. And sure enough, she started chasing the players again until we were forced the abandon the field. And that was the end of the Negro League in Milwaukee. The end.
PPS-These are my written words. What are you on about?
The way philosophy applies to word definitions is: It takes everyday words which are only used in certain sorts of situations, and tries to determine the "real" definition of those words, such that the definition covers all possible situations and avoids all ambiguity and contradiction.
Of course this endeavour is doomed to buncombe, because most everyday words don't have (or need) a precise definition. Insisting that they must and trying to find out what it is is like insisting on knowing what colour Winston Smith's underpants are. There is no answer, and there won't ever be until George Orwell rises from his grave and writes a prequel to 1984 where Winston frequently appears in his underpants for an hilarious assortment of reasons.
At any rate, what has all this got to do with "relating philosophy, as it applies to word definitions, to felt life"?
And for Christ's sake, use linebreaks.
How does this poem relate philosophy, as it applies to word definitions, to felt life?
I predict you will argue "But the author has reached a conclusion (that her dictionary is a history, etc.)" However, *reporting* on one's reaching a conclusion (as is done here), without arguing for it, is not at all the same as putting forward premises and using rules to transform the premises into a conclusion. And it's only in the latter sense that philosophy could be said to be involved.
p: you love me
c: we are in love.
Premises and conclusion. The first few lines of the poem seem almost written in notation form. Also it is a bit late to call me thick having had to remove one of your own postings because it said something like 'you are thick, logic is not part of philosophy'. Jesus, if poemranker were a rock group, you would be the drummer.
You also utterly don't understand what premises and conclusions are, probably because you can't read. Where has Dovina 'put forward' the premise "I love you"? SHE HASN'T. SHE HAS ONLY SAID THAT SHE SAID "I LOVE YOU."
Since you're thick, you won't understand. So here's an example. Compare these two.
1. Snow is green.
2. I said "Snow is green."
The first is false, the second is true. That's because in the first I am putting forward the premise that snow is green, but in the second I am simply reporting that I said that snow is green.
Dovina is simply reporting that she said and realised a series of things. She is not putting those things forward. Please think about this until you understand it, because otherwise you will post more wrong things.
I accept that:-
p: I said I love you
p: you said you love me
c: we are in love
is flawed. However it is still an attempt at philosophical enquiry and is set out as such. The correct conclusion would be we say we are in love.
Also you are especially thick for suggesting that the single line argument 'snow is green' tells us 'snow is green' to be false.
Whether or not the poeme is a philosophical enquiry is not the point. Please recall your original guffhampton:
"I believe this poem relates to philosophy in the sense that it puts forward premises which it uses to make conclusions."
You claim this poeme puts forward premises which it uses to make conclusions. I claim it doesn't, and have been explaining why. Your latest dumpling has strayed from the point, and we won't get anywhere until you screw your head back on and address the point.
Furthermore, you are *especially* especially thick for not understanding the difference between:
A: Snow is green
B: I, -=Dark_Angel=-, said the words "Snow is green".
A is false. B is true: I said it just now. Please reread the previous post until you understand it.
For another thing, "find fascination" is not a real English construction; rather, it's what I've come to identify as "typically Dovina" - an ignominious category chockfull of such gems as "realized its reciprocal" and "discover all that I've made quite pleasing".
For yet another thing, your bumming on about "strictly philosophical" anything, including that bum bum-filled bum of a "strangled verse" above is totally nuts. You'd have done much better to answer -=Dark_Angel=-,P.I.'s comment something like: "Almost any poem I, Dovina, can think of (except my own) is philosophically sound, meaning roughly that it can be regarded using the tools or language of philosophers without being found totally bum," instead of just proving his point. Frost's "The Road not Taken," for example, is more-than-adequately philosophical, proposing as it does that the profit from blindly picking only one of two more-or-less equivalent options (and without later knowing the result of picking the other option) is pretty much unknowable and only in the mind of the chooser, who thinks, man I'm sure lucky I picked this option, I'm a great chooser. And I bet you thought the road less travelled by really does make all the difference.
And for another thing, there is no anything without words, so saying there's no philosophy without them is crap and a cheap dis.
And for another thing, "the only things we can talk about logically are words and numbers" is simply wrongheaded. We can only talk about anything with words and numbers, so obviously thinking logically about them is pretty important.
And for another thing, saying "if so, there is no fun, and without fun, what good is logic." is bum twice-over and mispunctuated. This is essentially equivalent to saying both, "without harnesses and polo horses, there is no fun" AND "without fun, what good is sewage-treatment?" Bum and bum.
There is no anything without words,
so saying there is no philosophy without them
is crap.
The words of zodiac
Last night, in a fit of drunken pique, I went into my laboratory and constructed a robot which could feel (approximately) all the same things humans do. Unfortunately, being drunk, I neglected to program it with any words describing any state of being except "good" and "bad". Then I flipped the switch and immediately ordered it to spin around until it fell down.
"So, relate to me exactly how you feel now," I commanded, after it had fallen.
"I can't say," the robot answered. "Neither 'good' nor 'bad', really. And those are the only two words I have for expressing states of being. I can tell you half of my cybernetic units are malfunctioning, and my gyrometer is ten degrees out of whack -"
"Unsatisfactory!" I thundered, threatening it with a large salami I happened to be holding. (If there's anything robots are afraid of, it's the touch of luncheon meat.) "I don't have cybernetic units or a gyrometer, so how am I supposed to understand how you feel?!"
"Well," said the robot, shrinking a little from the frantically waggling salami, "I guess I feel bad."
"Bad?" I repeated, a little dubiously.
"Okay, fine then. Good."
"Unsatisfactory!" I said again.
I suppose now that if it had had more experience of the world, it could have answered, "I feel drunk," or "I feel like I've stood up too suddenly." Maybe later, it would be able to say, "Drinking alcohol makes me feel something like when I've spun around alot." But who knows? Maybe it would have just used the word 'good' for all those future situations. Anyway, I didn't have the chance to find out, as, with the salami-brandishing and the sticky philosophical dilemma confronting it, its cybertronics suddenly fused into a mass of kind of disgusting jelly.
Undaunted, I've constructed another robot and programmed it to answer only 'dizzy' or in terms of dizziness to any state-of-being question it faces. This second robot seems to be doing okay, but only as long as I keep it spinning. Otherwise, it tends to describe things like producing robo-stools or watching one of those sentimental home-appliance-company commercials as either "dizzying" or "not quite dizzy".
My question for you, Doctor, is, which of my two robots would win an all-out no-holds-barred steel-deathcage grudge-match? And: Which, if any of us, was really wrong?!??!?!?
Yours, as always,
zodiac in Islamica
Jack and Jill
(Strangled Verse) by Dovina
My name is Jack.
Iâm a philosopher.
I hold the axiom
that two despicable aspects of character
are fully determinable and separate.
I describe people having them as dorks or dingbats.
George is a dork, but not a dingbat.
Peter is a dingbat, but not a dork.
John is both.
I, of course, am neither.
I like Jill
and will set forth means for obtaining her affection.
My research shows that Jill likes Peter and John,
and she does not like George.
So far, she does not know me.
My analysis leads to two hypotheses:
1. Jill likes dingbats and does not like dorks,
and she accepts Johnâs dorkness either because
her affinity for dingbatness is greater
than her dislike of dorkness,
or
she accepts Johnâs dorkness for some unknown,
but overriding, reason.
2. Jill does not care about dorkness or dingbatness
and bases her affections of other factors.
In either case,
Jill most likely favors dingbats,
or at least disfavors them less than she disfavors dorks.
But if Jill likes dingbats, she is probably a dingbat.
I like Jill and dingbats are despicable,
so this uncertainty must be investigated.
I concentrated my research and found:
Jill likes two other dingbats,
and she does not dislike any of the dingbats on my list.
Therefore,
I shall now relinquish my writing pad,
tighten the noose,
and step off this chair.
Would you kindly bother explaining how it's hopeful, an appearance, and a failure? It's the least you can do, considering I've written Lord-knows-how-many novels on your last months' poemes meticulously explaining my points. And no, the rest of your comment isn't the answer. In fact, I've been more than reasonable; your contention is that your poem isn't required to be reasonable. Do you see the distinction? I bet not.
I've just googled the term "reciprocal AND contrary AND result AND opposite AND converse" and the results are overwhelmingly philosophical and mathematical articles. It's the simplest thing to conclude then that when these terms are used together, it's almost solely in the context of philosophy and mathematics. Even a dim like you would have seen that and intended it. Poemranker posters usually do.
And PS-check your message of 18-Nov-04/12:25 PM. I'm paraphrasing you, but not misquoting.
Philosophy doesn't need to be related to felt life, as you'll know if you've bothered yet with -=Dark_Angel=-,P.I.'s comment on the subject. You seem to have the idea that philosophy is some kind of useless dangling separate entity existing in its own rather stale ether and having nothing to do with felt life. You have this idea because your bum.
Yes. And bum. And that's not the point of your poem. The point is to use mathematical/philosophical/dictionary terms (I believe we've at least agreed on that) to transform love into hate. Anyway, try to worm out of your having twice performed the same action (ie, opposite/contrary) on "I love you" and come out with different answers.
[DIGRESSION: Let's suppose for a moment that contrary really means what you want it to, rather than what it does - ie, roughly, 'something different from the original direction,' the way a "contrary" course for a boat on a heading of 180 degrees might be, oh, 90 degrees. Or, alternately, the way a contrary opinion to the Bush Administration's assertion, "The war in Iraq was justified and excellently implemented" might be "The war in Iraq was necessary, but implemented badly." This, you'll see, is not an exact opposite according to your definition, but the Bush Administration still supresses it as contrary. Okay?
Well, you see why it's still a bum word to use in your poem, right? Because then there would be an infinite number of contraries for any given thing, when a huge part of the basis for your poem is that, given the phrase 'I love you', "ITS CONTRARY" is "I don't love you" and that's why there are so "many reverses". BUM!!! RESOUNDINGLY BUM!!!! Why isn't "its contrary" simply "I love you, but as a friend"? Or "I love you even more than I did"? Because then your life wouldn't be a "Compendium of devolution"!!!!]
That's because only you would think seeing "the dawn of the 28th century" in your lifetime has any special meaning then!
Suppose for a moment we used a system for time measurement that starts a new "century" every year; would you still feel a stirring of importance in your loins at having lived through the 6 billion and first through 6 billion and twenty-first centuries? Probably!
PS-For calling it "the 28th century", you fail. The word "century" supposes a special significance for 100s, a base-9 system does not. You'd have to celebrate eightyoneturies or something such. And who in his right mind would do that?!?!?!?!?!
You've just made the same mistake I did. Consider yourself suitably bum.
Congratulations. You've just said 'Your metaphor for the way we differently define poetry reminds me of the way you, zodiac, define poetry.' Bum.
I appreciate the great amount of time these ânovelsâ which you have written to me must have taken. While occasionally I find something helpful in them, they seem mostly concerned with angry rebuttals that wander from the topics originally set forth by whoever starts them. And I admit to having started some of the conflicts. When I said, âYou have rambled on and on in hopeful appearance of reasonableness,â I meant that you seem struggling to appear reasonable, hoping so much to succeed that you often deviate from the topic you are trying to debate, and leave yourself open for defeat.
While I could refute most of the points you have made in the comments above, Iâm going to mention the few things that I find helpful and which I might consider changing in the poem or in my way of pondering life, the two being related.
I did not know that I âhave the idea that philosophy is some kind of useless dangling separate entity existing in its own rather stale ether and having nothing to do with felt life,â but to the extent that I do or did, I should change or have changed.
The contrary of âI love youâ could, as you say, be many different things including, but not limited to âI donât love you.â The Bush administrationâs position on the Iraq war and the contrary position is a good example.
However, checking my posts on this poem, I find that I've stayed surprisingly (for me) true to my original topics, which, for the sake of being on the same page, are:
1) The converse of "I love you" is not "you love me";
2) The two uses of "realized" in your poem imply that the previous statements are necessarily (and not just arbitrarily) followed by the ensuing ones; this is the cause of most of the bumness of your poem, including 5) below;
3) Opposite and contrary are the same thing; ergo, instead of "many reverses" you only have two: "reciprocal" and "contrary";
4) Strictly speaking, "hate" is not the opposite of "love";
5) This poem is trying to speak strictly.
6) Your dictionary is not a "history written ahead of the fact," it's written after the fact of millions of people having the same experience.
7) You misspelled "blurred";
And lately,
8) zodiac's poetry is unfeeling and meaningless while Dovina's isn't;
9) zodiac must be a hard person to live with;
10) zodiac doesn't appreciate "centuries" because he is bum at Maths.
I should point out that you originated all these digressions. All my posts on this page have attempted to clarify or rebut one or more of the abovementioned points. Perhaps you're confusing my thread in this discussion with -=Dark_Angel=-, P.I.'s.
As far as your two "refuted" points: The first was an exaggeration on my part, based on your comment of 21-Nov-04/11:20 AM that your poem "presents an appearance of relating philosophy, as it applies to word definitions, to felt life," and a million other ways on this page and others you've tried to present the idea that analysis, especially philosophical analysis, renders things meaningless. So fucking sue me.
The second is a bum argument, as I've already pointed out how contrary and opposite are the same thing, and how if they weren't the same, hinging your "compendium of devolution" on one possible contrary for "I love you" would be just as bum. Your response is like saying, "The Japanese Empire's decisive victory in World War II is a good example of how the Japanese work ethic and slavish adherence to heirarchy are superior to American wealth, spunk, and free-marketism." Your starting assumption is simply not true.