> Ah -- but what if the wagon is a chariot?
then i'm sure bjorn would have been either accurate or pedantic enough to
specify "wagon or chariot-like object" - he was just using a figure of speech as
an example, and has already criticised me elsewhere for not taking him
metaphorically enough - i was really just saying that i did not agree with his
example or the conclusions he was taking from it
The point here being that a wagon
> is one kind of thing, but a chariot (a two- or four-wheeled wagon-like
> object!) is quite another, with a whole raft of different associations amd
> meanings associated with it. What we excavate is bits of wood, metal and
> perhaps the remains of draught animals, and maybe what the wheeled object
> was carrying (people, objects, whatever). Whether we understand it as a
> 'wagon' or a 'chariot' or something else (a '57 caddy?) depends upon our
> inter[retation, not anyrging inherent in the object itself.
>
the way i understood bjorn's comment, i didn't see him talking about
the parts of an excavated wagon, rather just your run of the mill, disassembled
wagon, which i assumed you could just run through your list of defining criteria
and label it as "wagon" to distinguish it from all other wheeled vehicles - i
took him literally enough in that sense to think he meant "wagon" when he
wrote "wagon" when he was just using an image to illustrate his point about
nothingness or whatever it was which started this whole meandering mess -
this whole discussion sometimes reminds me of the bit in "life of brian"
where brian starts talking about the "birds of the field" having no money but
being happy, and someone accusing him of saying the birds were scroungers...
some of the metaphors are being taken literally and some of the literal
statements are being taken metaphorically i find myself being defensive for a
few off-the-cuff comments about the original figure of speech which i found
fairly nonsensical to begin with: what are you supposed to understand by
essence/soul of a wagon within the contexts of the original quote?
geoff carver
http://home.t-online.de/home/gcarver/
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