Tail Recursion
10:05 pm May 14th, 2007At first I was a little daunted by the 700+ page bulk of Gödel, Escher, Bach; but a background in theoretical computer science/formal linguistics plus an almost embarrassingly strong fondness for meta-commentary are enabling me to breeze through it. I’m always a sucker for texts that cleverly clothe the same idea in parallel expressive metaphors, which is the extremely well-executed premise of this book.
Plus, it’s often laugh-out-loud funny in an obscurely intellectual way:
[in the context of a dialogue in which the dual meaning of "tonic" as something you drink and the first note of a musical scale] That stuff is renowned for its thirst quenching powers. Why, in some places people very nearly go crazy over it. At the turn of the century in Vienna, the Schönberg food factory stopped making tonic, and started making cereal instead. You can’t imagine the uproar that caused.
The proverbial German phenomenon of the “verb-at-the-end”, about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic pushing and popping.
