tired fools

Giving up smoking has made me (temporarily?) more irritable. A friend recommended a book to me (Philosophy in the Flesh - Lakoff and Johnson). Last night I sit down to read it. Who would not be irritated by this:

English in is made up of a container scheme (a bounded region in space), a profile that highlights the interior of the schema, and a structure that identifies the boundary of the interior as the landmark (LM) and the object overlapping with the interior as a trajector (TR). In “Sam is in the house,” the house is the landmark (LM) relative to which Sam, the trajector (TR), is located.
Spatial relations also have a built-in spatial “logics” by virtue of their image-schematic structures. Figure 3.1 illustrates the spatial logic built into the container schema:

Given two containers, A and B, and an object, X, if A is in B and X is in A, then X is in B.

We don’t have to perform a deductive operation to compute this. It is self evident simply from the image in Figure 3.1

I kid you not. There follows a diagram of two concentric circles labelled A and B with X sitting in the centre. Unbelievable. I haven’t finished the 600 pages yet. My bet is that the whole thing could have been written in a 100 or less.