There have been some problems in the translation. It may have been "I pink,
therefore I Spam", "I sink therefore I swam", or even "I stink therefore I
swam". Once, when the wheels came off Descartes, he whimpered "I kink,
therefore I cam". It was a hard axle to follow.
But in fact, Descartes said it in Latin, and it was: "Cogs I tow, ergo
sump", leading Wittgenstein later to pen his opus on intelligent
agricultural implements, "Tractoratus Logico-philosophicus". The
tractoratus later took up travelling in an obsessive way, and became the
first touring machine when Wittgenstein tried to negatively gear it. (Some
people may doubt this: I draw your attention to the first line of the
Tractoratus, which reads "The world is all that is the Massey-Ferguson".
Later editions have another version (The world is all that is the Case"),
after his sponsorship deal broke down, but I quote the original.)
Descartes next experimented with galvanoplasty, a means of coating entire
dead pigs in a layer of metal (to be marketed with the slogan "I zinc,
therefore I ham"), but then found that Galvani and Volta had not yet
invented the battery.
Crazed by his failed attempts to get electricity from battery hens linked
with chicken wire (the wire was slow, while the electrons all travelled
faster than a speeding pullet), Descartes suffered multiple personality
disorders and ended up as a vegetable ("I cinq, therefore I yam"), inspiring
Wittgenstein once more. Many people thought Wittgenstein was into shovels,
but it was actually potatoes that caught his fancy when he observed that he
believed in calling a spud a spud, adding "thank heavens for small
murphies", whereon his friends chortled hoe hoe, hence the confusion, but
they were a bunch of rakes anyhow.
Wittgenstein did in fact engage in a soft-shoe shovel, every now and then,
and he was familiar with cinematographer Charles Shovel, saying that 40
thousand horsemen can't be wrong - a comment that was later corrupted to 50
thousand Frenchmen, and attributed to Descartes, who did not, in spite of
rumours, pay ladies of easy virtue to follow him around Paris, so that
people would say "there goes Descartes before the whores".
I hope this clarifies matters.
peter
This file is http://www.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/trusci.htm
It may be freely reproduced for educationally useful purposes (you decide if it is useful), if the file is reproduced as it appears here -- I like people to know that it is me causing them annoyance :-)
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