Concerning the etymological speculation that I reported in the previous post Mark Liberman writes:
In the absence of evidence, this sort of thing becomes a sort of large-scale game of Balderdash. Of course, there are theories in which all rational thought is an internal version of this style of post-doc story-telling…
Well, I did describe them as “apocryphal”. Some are plausible (such as the derivation from the limitations of the linotype machine), others plainly fanciful. What intrigued me was less their status as scientific hypotheses (dubious in the absence of evidence) than as poetic reveries advanced in the guise of such hypotheses. Even so understood, they can be revealing, if not of the origin of “-30-“, then of the attitudes of the people who originally advanced them. (What does likening the completion of a story to thirty pieces of silver reveal about a hack’s attitude towards his profession?) More interesting still is why this obscure piece of markup should invite such interest and contrasting interpretation? Why is it a hermeneutic lightning rod?
So, just to be clear, I was not advancing hypotheses in the absence of evidence, nor am I sympathetic with any post-modernist conception of reason. In the immortal words of Randall Munroe:
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I agree, the interesting question is why -30- is “a hermeneutic lightening rod”.
But it’s not only postmodernists who think that (at least some) rational thought is actually post-hoc rationalization. Nor need this mean that such rationalizations are false, only that their source (which is irrelevant to their validity) is a bit messy.
One example: Holton’s distinction between “public science” and “private science”.
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