EDNote: My previous effort to forward this post, last Wednesday, apparently failed.  Here it is at last. ~SB

-------- Original Message --------   
 Subject:  connotations of "dobro"  
 Date:  Wed, 06 Aug 2008 10:34:47 +0200 (CEST)  
 From:  soloviev@irit.fr  
 To:  Vladimir Nabokov Forum <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU> <mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>   
 References:  <C4BCFCD2.AEAE%skb@bootle.biz> <mailto:C4BCFCD2.AEAE%skb@bootle.biz>   

Dear gospodin Stan,

>> Such generalized connotations are NOT our personal CHOICE,
>> citoyen-comrade!
>>
>> How LANGUAGE really works (trust me and the Gnoams!): X uses a word W
>> with an
>> intended semantic-range S(X,W) = [XWs1 ... XWsn]; Y reads/hears W with a
>> transformed semantic-range S(Y,W) = [YWs1 ... YWsm]. After
>> inner-diambiguations and decontextualizations (left as a Chomskian
>> exorcize

You will not frighten me with mathematical notation, even with
sexual connotation, you know.

I agree that they (connotaions)
are not always our personal choice, but it depends
on us - overemphasize them or not. I can invent a context to give
ANY word sexual connotations. A question is - who invented the context,
an author or a commentator. To some it may be an exercice, to others -
exorcism (maybe Chomskian...). When I hear modern discussions, in
particlar discussions about "sexism", I think often that the real
sexism is to obsessively sexualise everything, and preferences for male or
female are secondary even if many militants may disagree.

There
are also the contexts that desexualize even the words with direct
sexual meaning. A story I've heard from some old person who was
prisoner in a soviet camp and worked felling the trees was that
they used the word for male organ instead of "right" and for
female for "left" to alert other people when the tall tree
was falling left or right. It was not an amusement park and
they were mortally exhausted, and the sexual meaning was downplayed
if remembered at all in this situation.

I think it all is related to how we comment on VN.

S kommunisticheskim privetom

Sergei Soloviev
--------
Ochen chudnoi, Tovarich Sergei! But I'll thank you to leave my COMMUNAL PRIVATES out of this debate.

Explicit in my equations is the very point you make about authorial _intentions_ and personal reader-interpretations. The reader/re-reader must try to discern from _all_ the contextual clues what is being conveyed, allowing for the known tricks of the author: irony, satire, sarcasm, humour, litotes, deliberate decepion ...

Re-irony: I recall in early schooldays our teacher asked us to provide a sentence illustrating the word "marvellous." One kid offered: "Me sister came home in tears last night and told me dad she was pregnant and me dad said, 'Marvellous, bleedin' marvellous.'"

Re-"Whaddya mean by that?": Although we can't ask Pushkin: "List _all_ the connotations you had in mind when using 'dobro' in EO line whatever ... ," we can explore Pushkin's "propensities" and learn from those like VN who devoted much effort thereto. From AdaOnLine (renewed thanks!):

Pushkin was very fond of him and vied with him in scatological metaphors (see their letters). He was Karamzin's ward, Reason's godchild, Romanticism's champion, and an Irishman on his mother's side (O'Reilly)" (EO II, 27). [My interjection: O Really? Say no more!-- skb]

My pleasure in reading VN (over most rivals for my space-time attention) is this semantic challenge. There is VN's special wordscape (have I just coined this? If so, I rely on you getting my gist without rushing for a dictionary) that, for me, avoids the extremes of boring/obvious and impenetrable obscurity. I grew up, like VN, surrounded by word-play and in-family private jokes. Every drunk sounded like Joyce or Behan in full tall-tale flight. I share VN's fascination-cum-addiction with "rare" words, where "rare" is not that easy to define. One example springs to mind: meeting in Ada "the cockloft of Ardis Hall" always brings a smile. Every house in my childhood Liverpool had a cockloft: an attic-type (Attican!) storage place under the roof with a water-tank and maybe room for old papers and magazines (as is the case in Ardis Hall). Ours was actually extended and served as a small bedroom! Of course, I can imagine many readers smiling over cockloft for a different reason, viz., images of a rampant-penis. If you spend your half your life sleeping in a cockloft, such allusions are greatly diluted although never entirely absent. One might say that allusions like jokes "wear thin" or "wear off"

I appreciate Sergei's Gulag (Proshchalny potselui, Solzhenistyn [do I need a vocative or what?]) example of what you might called "reverse scatologicization," where "naughty" words replace "clean" ones. It happens almost without reflection. "Beethoven? I dig that shit, man."

CTaH

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