Overheard in the Lounge—“Occam’s Bolt Cutters”
The SpecGram
Busybody Elves™
[We join the conversation already in progress.]
Linguist Subject #4З7: ... here you wrote “the Principal”—pee ay ell—“Occam’s Razor”. Didn’t you mean “the Principle”—pee ell ee—“of Occam’s Razor”? Or am I just daft and don’t get it as usual?
Linguist Subject #9Ο2: No, no, it’s “Principal”. There are many levels, actually. “Principal”, “secondary”, “ancillary”, and so on—as many as the levels of a typical university administration. What’s not so well known, though, is that Occam didn’t just do the Razor thing. There are also Occam’s Shears, Occam’s Scissors, and, if you need to take off the gloves, the rhetorically rough Occam’s Bolt Cutter.
Linguist Subject #7б5: Indeed! Most linguists don’t get into all of that, though, because the stubble of our field yields to just about anything. Frankly, Occam’s Butter Knife would cut most syntactic theories to shreds.
[The more you know...]
