Taken out of context for your enjoyment:

". . .they say that a man who plays with words and makes anagrams and violates the language has ugliness in his soul and hates his father. . ." -Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

". . .they say that a man who plays with words and makes anagrams and violates the language has ugliness in his soul and hates his father. . ." -Umberto Eco

And I say that Umberto Eco who writes books about language that speak only to Eco and his admirers who pretend to understand his poorly stated ideas, hates our plainspeaking souls and loves his ugly father.

(I'm only kidding about his father.)

> speak only to Eco and his admirers who pretend to understand his poorly stated ideas

Interesting point; dope quote nonetheless. Put me in the pretentious admirers category, but I kind of thought that the indistinctness that might seem to be a murkiness of ideas was in fact Eco's way of reflecting the inherent fuzziness of the world in general. Foucault’s Pendulum seems to me to be a study of meaning and how it can be developed and bent. If one sees his goal as an attempt to display ideas with his language directly and scientifically (the relativistic intellectual view of Belbo, etc.) then reading his books won't be very fruitful; but if we see them rather as an attempt to trace the intrinsic lack of any closure in our world, per se (Diabolicals' view?), then maybe he makes a little more sense. I have to add that I've never read anything of his where I didn't find the translation completely sus, so this could compound the abstractness and oddness of the already off-beat Italian.

belligerent 'life is a non-conclusion' youth

Jazz - There is enough context there for me to ask 'who are "they"'.

Although BY answered my question a li'l bit, there must be someone specific who made *that b******t popular... [eg]