If Your Humble Blogger didn’t have much to say about the umpty-’leventh reread of Wild Horses two years ago, perhaps there isn’t much to say about the umpty-’elfth. Umptwelfth. Umpty-enth plus one.
Of course, really, when you’ve read a book umpty-’leven times, and you read it again, you have still read it umpty-’leven times. The question, then is at what read you start having read it umpty-’leven times. Certainly not after the first read, when you’ve read it once. Read it again, and you’ve simply re-read it, or perhaps read it twice. After the third time through, then? No, on your third reading, you’ve just read it three times, or if you are as pretentious as YHB, thrice. Certainly not umpty-’leven times. Four readings? Five? Ten?
Is this one of those sorites situations, where we can’t find out which grain makes a collection into a heap? Of course it is. You expect umpty-’leven to be an imprecise term, so finding that it is difficult to define it precisely is scarcely a shock. And yet ... is umpty-’leven more imprecise than heap? Or bald? Or poor? Or tall? Or fast? Or strong?
The amazing thing, really, is that we can communicate at all. It’s astonishing, really, that when I say umpty-’leven that anybody has any idea what I mean at all. It’s also astonishing that anybody knows more or less what I mean by tall. Given that our perceptions of the universe are incomplete and that they differ one to another, it’s marvelous that they overlap enough that, probabilistically, most of you will think of umpty-’leven as being in the same general range. It’s even more wonderful to think that even if we don’t, we can still carry on the conversation as if we did, conserving meaning and getting on to the good bits.
If there are any. There are in the book, lots of ’em, but not in the report.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.