The pelting of soritical hail

There's a reference early on in The Sot-Weed Factor to "the elegance of a sorites"—how odd, thought I, isn't that an anachronism for a book set around the time of the publication of Pilgrim's Progress?  But no: turns out that "sorites" is not, as a I thought, an eponym taken from an otherwise uncelebrated philosopher of recent days who formulated a paradoxical inference, but the name of a kind of inference which can after all be perfectly valid: A series of propositions, in which the predicate of each is the subject of the next, the conclusion being formed of the first subject and the last predicate, whose earliest attestation in the OED is from 1551. And even the paradoxical meaning (coyly defined by the OED as a sophistical argument turning on the definition of a heap) dates from the 1760s, and the text there refers to the argument's having been used by the Hellenistics.

Wotta world.  The next paragraph concludes with this sentence:

By age eighteen he had reached his full height and ungainliness; he was a nervous, clumsy youth who, though by this time he far excelled his sister in imaginativeness, was much her inferior in physical beauty, for though as twins they shared nearly identical features, Nature saw fit, by subtle alterations, to turn Anna into a lovely young woman and Ebenezer into a goggling scarecrow, just as a clever author may, by the most delicate adjustments, make a ridiculous parody of a beautiful style.

Har har, John.  Aren't we precious.

Comments

[bitchphd]

I'm assuming that your final line there is a joke.

[ben wolfson]

Quite. Actually, only Barth is precious. I am common as dirt, dirt!

[abc]

why, your eyes are soulful :)

[will]

I wrote a paper on Barth in high school. Oh so many years ago.