Geoffrey Sampson wrote:
> Americans have been preoccupied with politics, so "scientific progress"
> stops, while the rest of us "chat"? Interesting.
You accidentally snipped the words of mine you're attempting to paraphrase
here, but I happen to still have them:
>> This particular thread seems to be more of a chat than an instrument of
>> scientific progress. Although there's probably no good reason for that
>> not to occur from time to time, one factor in this case may be that many
>> Americans have been preoccupied with politics for the last ten days.
I don't know how you arrived at your paraphrase from my words, but I
apologize if I was unclear.
I had the (possibly false) impression that most of the chatty contributors
on the AmE/BrE thread were Americans or at least located in the US, and
was suggesting our recent preoccupation with politics as a lame excuse for
not being any more thoughtful. I don't think my words entail anything
about the rest of you. In fact, I think they fail to exclude models in
which the rest of you were the only ones providing thoughtful
contributions, as nearly as I can tell.
So I guess I should have said, "I figure most of the chatty contributors
on this thread are Americans or at least located in the US, and I can only
offer our recent preoccupation with politics as a lame excuse."
(If I had wanted to intimate that one society had an edge on another in
the scientific progress department, I would have favored the Chinese. But
that would have been even more off-topic than the meta-message I did
choose to convey.)
-- Mark
Mark P. Line
Polymathix
San Antonio, TX
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