6.0168 Rs: Borges; 'you guys' (3/61)

Elaine Brennan & Allen Renear (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Wed, 29 Jul 1992 16:19:16 EDT

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 6, No. 0168. Wednesday, 29 Jul 1992.


(1) Date: Tue, 28 July 1992 13:32:07 -0800 (11 lines)
From: Mary Whitlock Blundell <mwb@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: 6.0163 Query: Borges Story (1/18)

(2) Date: Tue, 28 Jul 92 16:16 CDT (36 lines)
From: "Robert J. OHara" <RJO@WISCMACC>
Subject: Borges and the 1:1 map

(3) Date: Wed, 29 Jul 92 07:28 CDT (14 lines)
From: Robin Smith <RSMITH@KSUVM.KSU.EDU>
Subject: 'you guys'

(1) --------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 28 July 1992 13:32:07 -0800
From: Mary Whitlock Blundell <mwb@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: 6.0163 Query: Borges Story (1/18)

I think the tale is translated in the Penguin collection of Borges stories
entitled *Labyrinths."

<<<<>
{^_^}
*) (*

(2) --------------------------------------------------------------42----
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 92 16:16 CDT
From: "Robert J. OHara" <RJO@WISCMACC>
Subject: Borges and the 1:1 map

Ted Parkinson asks for a reference to the Borges story of a map with scale
of 1:1 that covered the entire country it represented. I spent a while trying
to track this down myself a few months ago, and found the answer in a short
note published last year that recounted yet another person's search for the
source of the reference (it seems to have circulated widely by word of mouth).
The short note about the story is:

Crampton, Jeremy. "An elusive reference: the 1:1 map story." _Cartographic
Perspectives_, #8, Winter 1990-91, pp. 26-27.

According to Crampton the story appears in Borges's book _Dreamtigers_ in
a section called "On Rigor in Science".

An earlier 1:1 map story appears in Lewis Carroll's _Sylvie and Bruno Concluded_
(1893). A section called "The Man in the Moon" (vol. 2, p. 169 in the edition
I saw [London: Macmillan]) contains the following:

"What do you consider the _largest_ map that would be really useful?"
"About six inches to the mile."
"Only _six inches_!" exclaimed Mein Herr. "We very soon got six _yards_ to
the mile. Then we tried a _hundred_ yards to the mile. And then came the
grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of
a_a mile to the mile_!"
"Have you used it much?" I enquired.
"It has never been spread out, yet," said Mein Herr: "the farmers objected:
they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So now
we use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly
as well."

Bob O'Hara, RJO@WISCMACC.bitnet
Department of Philosophy and The Zoological Museum
University of Wisconsin - Madison
(3) --------------------------------------------------------------24----
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 92 07:28 CDT
From: Robin Smith <RSMITH@KSUVM.KSU.EDU>
Subject: 'you guys'

Although I assume the generic plural 'you guys' to be older than I, my own ex-
perience about its distribution parallels George Lang's. I first became aware
of it as a teen-ager in the South in the early 1960s (Tennessee, to be exact);
it was characteristic of 'immigrants' from the North (primarily New England, as
I remember), and appeared to me to be the exact equivalent of the local plural
'y'all'. A standard southerner's test for non-southerners attempting to sound
southern was to catch someone using 'y'all' as a singluar; does a similar phe-
nomenon attach to 'you guys' where it's indigenous?
Robin Smith
Philosophy/Kansas State University