James C. McKusick

Hnnh. There's a tonne of good information here--situating Coleridge within the major linguistic debates of his day, the rational-empirical (which McKusick connects perspicaciously and legitimately with its 20th-century descendent, nativism-emergentism) and the natural-arbitrary (which, again, McKusic connects persuasively with the rational-empirical debate and subdivides in terms of "mimetic" vs. "expressive" naturalism, the language whose form teaches us something about the world vs. the show more language whose form teaches us something about ourselves). He is really good on the difference between natural language as elevated--aesthetics and semantics at one, reflecting the noble forms of the Real--and natural language as ordinary--the tensions between Romantic atavism and Romantic progressivism played out in the linguistic realm. But then somewhere along the line you realize that he's holding Coleridge's thoughts on hieroglyphics predating speech and the words "I" and "you" deriving from characters representing an eye or a yew tree up as more or less tenable arguments because they derive from "actuall linguistic material" (no matter how spurious or misused) rather than from nowhere at all (which is certainly the case for some of Coleridge's contemporaries), and you're just like, shit, this guy doesn't just think he's doing intellectual history, he thinks he's doing linguistics, at least of a sort,and that makes it hard to take anything he says seriously for the next hundred pages or so. Get your head out of your ass, English prof. Just because you read about the way we understood things in the past, and science too easily falls into scientism, doesn't mean you can just walk around pronouncing on whatever discipline you like and have people give you the time of day. show less