GHASTLY INIQUITIES exhumed, uplifted
on ten-foot poles; but quiddities are six-
feet-under still, ringed round with bombshells
that may never go off. Your question,
yes? Hands up if you heard GEISTLICH.
Five points deducted for INEQUITIES.
Spirit's spirit spirits spirit; quine's
quines quine quines.
Yadda yadda yadda yadda.
* * *
"Spirit's spirit spirits spirit": title of an essay by Geoffrey Bennington
on Derrida's _De l'esprit_.
Named after the philosopher W.V.O. Quine, a "quine" is a computer program
that outputs its own source code when executed. The verb "to quine" has
two meanings that I know of; one is "to refer to oneself in the manner of
a program reproducing its own source code" (hence, it goes without saying
that quines quine), and the other is "to deny resolutely the existence of
importance of something real or significant". I'm not sure that quines
*do* quine quines in this second sense - they're self-referential, not
self-refuting. But perhaps if Quine had written quines they might have
denied their own existence resolutely, perhaps outputting a declaration to
the effect that there exists no program whose source code is the source
code that they themselves output (which is their own source code) - a sort
of variant on the Cretan Liar's paradox.
Yaddas normally come in threes.
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