Chiff and Fipple Forums

Hey, I got an idea. Let's go find a butterfly and break it on the rack!

What's your drift, there, Jim?

just wants to play with his Christmas prezzy?

I think that Jim's comment is straightforward and not too difficult to understand. He sees the forum members kicking a dead horse (excuse me Denny), if I may use another animal analogy.

is fine!

they don't mind near so much when they're dead, as a rule

Doug_Tipple wrote:I think that Jim's comment is straightforward and not too difficult to understand. He sees the forum members kicking a dead horse (excuse me Denny), if I may use another animal analogy.

I agree anybody could read it that way as it's convenient to do so. But you know me by now: when it comes to metaphors, a butterfly and the rack doesn't add up to a dead horse and blows rained upon it for me; the new analogy is quite creative and finer than that. So the choice of images raises my interest, hence my question. But then it's not an earth-shattering bit of business, either.

Let Sporus tremble –"What? that thing of silk,
Sporus, that mere white curd of ass's milk?
Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel?
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?"
Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings,
This painted child of dirt that stinks and stings;
Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys,
Yet wit ne'er tastes, and beauty ne'r enjoys...


Alexander Pope

A 'broken Butterfly' it may well Bee. . .but a mere Tale of a Tub it remains. . .as we Slowly wend our way to our Un-swift conclusion.

Bob

Ah, thank you, Rob. I don't recall ever encountering the reference at all, to up to now.

No takers on the ass milk curds, then?





Rob

as, perhaps one of the few C&F members that have milked an both equine & goat and made goat cheese, no.

Is there enough fat in the milk of an ass to get it to curdle?



Don't ya just hate desperate times?

Rob Sharer wrote:No takers on the ass milk curds, then?

Gawd.

Rob Sharer wrote:Let Sporus tremble –"What? that thing of silk,
Sporus, that mere white curd of ass's milk?
Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel?
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?"
Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings,
This painted child of dirt that stinks and stings;
Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys,
Yet wit ne'er tastes, and beauty ne'r enjoys...


Alexander Pope

Yes, I found this too. Thanks.

Freud famously put psychoanalytic principles to work in Totem and Taboo, thus 'explaining' incest taboos and the origin
of religion among Australian aborigines. A famous anthropologist, whose name I can not recall, wrote a critique,
methodically showing, from several angles, how Freud had got the anthropological facts wrong.
Twenty years later he wrote that he regretted doing this: he had 'broken the butterfly upon the rack.'

The expression connotes the methodical destruction of a phantasm or a wisp. Like nuking Tinkerbell.
Or the treatise demonstrating that Santa is impossible, in that he would have to travel faster than light to
get down all those chimneys in the allotted time. Indeed, even if he stayed under light- speed, his mass would so expand
as he approached it that maintaining his speed
would require more energy than is available in the universe. Further he wouldn't fit down the chimneys-due
to his expanded mass. (And what of children without chimneys, anyway?)

jim stone wrote:The expression connotes the methodical destruction of a phantasm or a wisp. Like nuking Tinkerbell.

Yes, that much was apparent to me. Not knowing them to be a literary borrowing, it was the images themselves - butterfly and wheel, or in your case rack - that caught my notice.

jim stone wrote:Or the treatise demonstrating that Santa is impossible, in that he would have to travel faster than light to
get down all those chimneys in the allotted time. Indeed, even if he stayed under light- speed, his mass would so expand
as he approached it that maintaining his speed
would require more energy than is available in the universe. Further he wouldn't fit down the chimneys-due
to his expanded mass. (And what of children without chimneys, anyway?)

Unfortunately I know nothing of academic argument, so am I right in taking your point to be that any one of the above points alone should have sufficed?

Nanohedron wrote:Unfortunately I know nothing of academic argument, so am I right in taking your point to be that any one of the above points alone should have sufficed?

I think maybe the point is that there is (in the Santa case) no need to adduce any such technical arguments to dismiss a self-evident fantasy, let alone write a treatise. It's overkill. (Which rather ignores the potential fun in such investigations and misses the point in that particular case, which is not, perchance, a serious disproof and debunking of Santa but using the myth as an opportunity to explore some real science.)

That said, my initial reading of Jim's butterfly post, not knowing its literary/metaphorical background, did cause me to wonder quite what he was getting at; to whit, thoughts along roughly this train:

a butterfly is a thing of delicacy and beauty; to rack it is not only a severe case of overkill even if torture or dismemberment are the aim (when pulling it apart with the fingers would more than suffice!), but is a pointless and wanton destruction of something of intrinsic worth.

It was those apparent "value" implications which disconcerted me, and, I suspect Nano too. Why was Jim equating the McCarty flute to a butterfly and we examiners and critics to villainous and excessive torturers? Why did he seem to think the McCarty flute a thing of great worth? It now seems he wasn't (quite) doing either; he was just coining or alluding to a recognised (not by me ) saying/metaphor for overkill. I'm glad I didn't jump in sooner!