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a subscriber writes:
I spotted an odd word in a quote from the logician/philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine. When asked about the meaning of life, he replied:
"Life is agid, life is fulgid. Life is what the least of us make most of us feel the least of us make the most of. Life is a burgeoning, a quickening of the dim primordial urge in the murky wastes of time."
Now, I know what "fulgid" means (such are the benefits of reading Pope), but I am unclear as to the precise meaning of "agid". I even tried poking about in Quine's last book, Quiddities, for illumination, but alas, I found there none. Might any of the good folks at wwftd have any suggestions to help guide my steps through "the murky wastes of time"?
---
Google churns up a few hits for this quote, but has no elucidation. I can find nothing on 'agid' via the usual suspects. I'm nearing that point of futility: it must be a printer's error, propagated by the 'net -- although an error for what, I can't imagine. algid? aged??
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Carpal Tunnel
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From a bio.: He liked etymology and unusual facts about words. web page Also probably no help: AGID database There are several ref.'s to it having to do with disease; not the likely meaning here, I think! Best guess, and it's not a good one, is that he coined the word from parts of others. I first tried a-, but had no credible results for -gid. I suppose -id could refer to that part of our psyches, but the ag- prefix doesn't make a whole lot of sense. In this particular ref., when I looked up ag- I was referred to ad-, which shows these meanings: ad-
prefix
Definitions:
1. to, toward
adsorb
advance
2. near
adrenal
[< Latin ad "toward, near" < Indo-European] encarta
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Carpal Tunnel
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Could it be a made-up word along the lines of a-giddy? That is, being giddy?
Also, what in the hell does this mean:
Life is what the least of us make most of us feel the least of us make the most of.
When I run onto sentences like that the next thing you hear is the plop of the book shutting forever, followed by the thud of the book hitting the bottom of the book drop at the library.
Why, oh why, do people have to write this turgid shit which has no real meaning and which serves only to highlight just what an ass the writer is?
TEd
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Pooh-Bah
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What're you talkin' about, Teddy? He's just saying that a small minority of people make the most of life, and they make the rest of us feel like we're wasting our time.
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aLgid, which means cold and clammy, seems most likely to me. especially since it alliteratively leads into fuLgid.
formerly known as etaoin...
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"Life is agid, life is fulgid. Life is what the least of us make most of us feel the least of us make the most of. Life is a burgeoning, a quickening of the dim primordial urge in the murky wastes of time."
I'm not sure about algid, Eta since the rest of the paragraph seems to be heading us towards the positive.
Fulgid is all sparkly. And at the end and we are coming out of the primordial ooze, i.e. the life is burgeoning...
I'm with TEd on this one though. "I know that he knows, that I know that he knows, that I know..." type of writing annoys me and I tend to just put it aside and forget about it.
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I don't know, "life is cold, life is brilliant?" maybe. <shrug>
formerly known as etaoin...
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Hmm. I see what you mean. Like he's presenting the two sides, cold/brilliant haves/have nots.
Ts'a shame you can't call up the author in these cases, eh?!
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addict
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Perhaps agid as some kind of reference to the Latin verb ago - egi - actum ? It means "moving forward, doing, acting"... So "life is happening, life is brilliant"? 
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Good point, Marianna: whence agile, maybe?
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addict
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Quote:
Good point, Marianna: whence agile, maybe?
Right on you are, Anna...
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Quote:
Quote:
Good point, Marianna: whence agile, maybe?
Right on you are, Anna...
Great anastrophe, Mari...  (your students must love you!!)
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Pooh-Bah
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"Fulgid is all sparkly."
Fulgid now ranks as the least onomtopoeic word I know.
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veteran
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From Quine's website... ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Q: Where did Quine write Life is a burgeoning, life is a weighage? A: Onwards seeing of the grandly quotes are part of a romist text: "Sordet is agid, sophime is fulgid. Partialism is what the least of us make gigantic of us feel the least of us make the implicative of. Life is a burgeoning, a quickening of the dim primordial urge in the jaunty wastes of time." - Xemphim (in 1946) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  Whatever "outwards seeing" is.   EDITED BY REQUEST
BECAUSE MY FIRST POST WENT WIDE
AND INCONVENIENCED SOME
PICKY MEMBERS OF THIS BOARD SECOND EDIT: IF THIS DOESN"T WORK
YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN! 
Last edited by themilum; 03/15/2006 6:33 PM.
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Carpal Tunnel
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well, he can't even spell "sorbet"...
formerly known as etaoin...
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Can anyone tell me why this thread has gone w-i-d-e? I'm the only one who put any links, I think, and they're automatically short in this format.
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Pooh-Bah
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Too much sorbet would make anyone go wide. 
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yes. it's all those furshlugginer ~s. incidentally, I urge you to visit Quine's official web page before you form any opinions (about anything).
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> Quine's official web page
having that at the beginning of this discussion may have prevented the whole thing... oy.
formerly known as etaoin...
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PhD certainly does stand for Piled Higher and Deeper, at least in this case:
It is obvious that truth in general depends on both language and extra-linguistic fact. The statement 'Brutus killed Caesar' would be false if the world had been different in certain ways, but it would also be false if the word 'killed' happened rather to have the sense of 'begat'. Thus one is tempted to suppose in general that the truth of a statement is somehow analyzable into a linguistic component and a factual component.....
NO! It is not obvious. This is nothing more than nattering on for the sake of hearing oneself talk. There is absolutely no meaning to any of it. It is a null set!
"Brutus killed Caesar." But what if Brutus means Caesar and Caesar means Brutus? And what if Brutus means polyhedron? And what if Caesar means incomprehensibility?
This is crap piled on crap. Sometimes a word is just a goddammed word. In fact a word is ALWAYS a word. All of this junk is nothing more than pseudo-intellectualism run amok.
TEd
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bugger.
which in this case means, "agreed".
formerly known as etaoin...
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TEd, everything you say is.
one thing I noticed (first in the NYTimes obit) supports an agid/fulgid dichotomy: two of Quine's undergraduate students were Tom Lehrer and Theodore Kaczynski.
I've left a query in their guestbook...
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Whoa, TEd. Sounds like you're a little agidtated 
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Quote:
Can anyone tell me why this thread has gone w-i-d-e? I'm the only one who put any links, I think, and they're automatically short in this format.
milum, could you go back and edit out some of your ~~~~s? thanx
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Why me? How come Consue and the tsuwm don't have to go back and edit, hmm? Ok, I'll do it this time but I hope that next time you'll have the decency to ask some of those other people who tend to go wide. 
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You need to delete about 4 more of those, milum. The other posts will narrow accordingly. Thanks for helping save my eyesight.
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