Well that would be a first!
Actually, you may not have noticed my lack of presence in the preceding fifty-some posts. I cannot say that I find this sort of discussion interesting to me personally. I generally don't do well in deep philosophical discussions because I'm really not a deep sort of guy. I guess I don't really care about when a word is or isn't a word or when a word is a symbol or whether a digitus impudicus is a word or a symbol or a referent or whatever. Please note that I'm not belittling the discussion, I'm belittling myself.
I've read some of the stuff about semantics by Hayakawa and some other similarly boring people, and it turns me off, primarily because I don't find myself gaining anything from the interminable prose he and others of that ilk seem capable of generating. I'm much more interested in a discussion of why something is humorous because humor is so important to me.
TEd
