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"?

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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??

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

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?

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.

aLgid, which means cold and clammy, seems most likely to me. especially since it alliteratively leads into fuLgid.

"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.

I don't know, "life is cold, life is brilliant?" maybe. <shrug>

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?!

Quote:

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turgid shit

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Heh.®