POTM Nomination. Re: A true description of Gene Scott. was Re: Thompson decides

On Wed, 07 Jan 2009 19:38:55 -0600, Jim Willemin
<jim***willemin@hot***mail.com> enriched this group when s/he wrote:

I know it is a little off topic for TO, but I do think this needs to
be preserved in some way.

I guess the question here is simple: Does a word exist if no one
anywhere uses it? If no one anywhere used the word 'cannibal' to mean
humans who eat other humans before 1490, did that word exist before
1490? The phenomenon of humans eating other humans certainly existed; I
suspect it has existed for hundreds of thousands of years. The point
here is that before 1490 there is no record of anyone anywhere uttering
the sound 'ka-n?-b?l' (Please replace each of the query marks with a
schwa to get the standard phonetic representation of the word) to refer
to a person who eats human flesh. They used words like
'anthropophagite' instead to mean the same thing. That is the primary
argument of the 'evolutionist' side - those sounds were never strung
together in that way to mean 'anthropophagite' before 1492. It seems
to me that in order to make a case for an ancient Mesopotamian origin
for the sound 'ka-n?-b?l' in any association with the eating of human
flesh, one would sort of have to produce an example of the word in use
in ancient or classical texts - either that, or argue that Columbus had
a working knowledge of Old Chaldean and was up to snuff on his Old
Testament scholarship and for some reason wanted to call people he
supposed were Mongol potentates 'priests of Baal'.


It's that simple. If the word had an ancient origin, it must have been
used in ancient times. There is no record of that. The Greeks used
another word to mean 'people who eat people'. It seems the Old
Testament used euphemisms and circumlocution when it started to speak of
the matter. If the word 'cannibal' was not spoken by anyone, nor
written by anyone, nor recorded anywhere, how can you say it existed?
If it didn't exist, how could it have an origin? Origin implies the
beginning of existence of something, right? Something that never
existed cannot have an origin, and a word (i.e. a sound associated with
a specific meaning) that has never been used, spoken, written, or
thought by anyone anywhere doesn't exist, at least as far as I can
figure.

Now, it *is* possible for a word to be invented, and the inventor of
that word may derive the sounds from extant sources and attach a meaning
to that sound (e.g. I once invented the word 'chiroseismic', from the
Greek for 'hand' and 'to wave', to mean 'hand-waving; general, inexact,
probably erroneous'). So, I suppose that it is possible that the first
person to use the word 'cannibal' wanted to invent a simpler way to say
'anthropophagite' and had just been pondering the ancient Canaanite
religion and so produced a new compound word - but it seems to me that
is pretty improbable under the circumstances, since from the discussion
to date, the first documented use of the word 'cannibal' anywhere ever
to refer to man-eaters was to refer to a tribe whose name sounded sort
of like 'cannibal' and whose members were reputed to eat people, and had
no possible connection to ancient Mesopotamia at all.


Against this argument, we have the inerrancy of Gene Scott, who
neglected to document his apparently plagiarized results.

--
Bob.

.

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