From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.science.mathematics.categories/5939 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: "Robert J. MacG. Dawson" Newsgroups: gmane.science.mathematics.categories Subject: Re: The humility topos Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:20:41 -0300 Message-ID: Reply-To: "Robert J. MacG. Dawson" NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: dough.gmane.org 1277907465 23124 80.91.229.12 (30 Jun 2010 14:17:45 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@dough.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2010 14:17:45 +0000 (UTC) Cc: Categories list To: Michael Barr Original-X-From: categories@mta.ca Wed Jun 30 16:17:43 2010 Return-path: Envelope-to: gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from mailserv.mta.ca ([138.73.1.1]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1OTy6g-00021t-3q for gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org; Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:17:42 +0200 Original-Received: from Majordom by mailserv.mta.ca with local (Exim 4.61) (envelope-from ) id 1OTxZa-0007S8-2y for categories-list@mta.ca; Wed, 30 Jun 2010 10:43:30 -0300 Original-Sender: categories@mta.ca Precedence: bulk Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.science.mathematics.categories:5939 Archived-At: On 6/28/2010 4:49 PM, Michael Barr wrote: > Yesterday's NY Times magazine had an article about the British > experimental novelist David Mitchell. Mitchell told a story to the author > of the article about how, after an event in New Zealand a woman, a > medievalist there asked him if knew about the humility topos. I imagine > that Mitchell came across as very humble. At any rate she went on to say, > and I quote because I am not certain how to parse it, "in the medieval era > humility was seen as a great virtue. The humility topos was used for > those abbots...who were actually monsters of arrogance, but were always > banging on about how humble they were...". The woman said to him, "Watch > out for the humility topos" and then disappeared. Being but little learned, I looked this up. Wikipedia has (under "Inventio") Topoi are categories that help delineate the relationships among ideas. Specifically, the "humility topos" is the rhetorical strategy of pretending ignorance or naivete to entertain or disarm the listener. http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms_h.html Identifying the subobject classifier must be left to wiser heads than my own. -Robert Dawson [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]