ABSTRACT
So Coyote, what are your thoughts on this companion piece for graduate students? (chompchomp) Well Raven, first off from what I’m reading here companion
comes from middle English, via old high German, Germanic Anglo-Saxon, old French, a soupçon of Romany, a smidgen of Gothic and a dash of Protobasque, and it basically means someone (or in this case ‘something’) you eat bread with. They don’t say if it’s a loaf of bread or a bun or a sandwich, though they do mix in Xlaib zaXlaibaz and gahlaiba indicating loaf. So it’s a noun! Otherwise I guess that pretty much leaves it wide open eh? What
about the ‘graduate student’ part, what does your etymology book say about that? It’s not so straightforward Raven. I had to use online sources because the goat
ate all of my reference books and I’m banned from the local library until I pay for the goat’s lunch, besides which I had to look up ‘graduate’ and ‘student’ separately in an etymological sense so there is a dissembling multi-furcation. It gets a bit complicated: on the one paw it depends on whether you’re talking about a person, a human being or if you’re talking about a flask or tube or other container marked with a progressive series of degrees (lines or numbers or both) for measuring liquids or solids. I’d go with the first one: it’s less complicated or perhaps less ‘implicated’ (Bohm
1980). Okay, it seems ‘graduate’ ipse comes from Latin via middle Latin and relates to
either ‘taking a degree’ or a step or grade presumably in that process, so I guess we could still be talking about a flask jar or tube depending on which syllable the accent is on. In the context of what we’re supposed to be doing as ‘others’ [alterrific] it relates
also to postgraduate, in other words to taking an after degree or a degree after, though it could also refer to an interpenetrating enfolding (Deleuze 1988) timefulness after the graduations or gradations are worn off and you can’t measure
accurately with it anymore except to say ‘a flask of’ or ‘a tube of’ or ‘a student of’, though that might be quite useful in particular recipes and instances. ‘Student’ comes from Latin, the noun comes from a second type conjugation
verb through middle English and means ‘to direct one’s zeal at’. Zeal? Verb? Hmmm, perhaps we might encourage graduate students to work
more in the verb category – at least the active verb not passive voice. Raven, but we can’t just stop at Latin in our search for roots or ‘rhizomes’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987). From what I’ve heard, Latin didn’t come to the Italian peninsula until around 900 BC and it was influenced by Greek and Celtic and probably Etruscan, too, and the sounds of the natural world. I’m not sure where the derivative nature of knowledge is going to get us other than playing around with the journey of words describing that to which they are referring. How far back do we go to discover context? Scratches on rock cave art, archaeografitti petronyms? You and I both know that there are no beginnings, just continuations of muddles. Hmmm, we seem to be getting stuck in a linguistic magquire. Well, let’s slog
through it, eh Coyote? Do you remember way back, quando quando, we took a trip to protoindoeurope and had to learn Venetic Raetic Ligurian and Liburnian and that was just in the cis-Alps and proto-Adriatic? We hadn’t even gotten as far south as the Etruscans and were already multiply linguistically challenged. Ah, but the grapes, the wine, the sun. I remember we decided to go somewhere where there was less linguistic variation.
Yes, our archaeonordic trip in a leaky sea raft. Pass the bread, please. Librarian: This is a library. Please confine your eating to the vestibule or the
out-of-doors. We don’t want pests consuming the books! Hmphh! Coyote, to get back to thinking about how we can share some of our discoveries
with graduate students, so far we’re looking at directing zeal and eating bread with now we’re getting somewhere! We’ll probably need to drink something, too, one cannot live on bread and loans. What is it basically that these graduate students are needing to know? Shouldn’t
they already know all this stuff after 16 or more years of schooling of directing their zeal? Sharing bread with? Where is the talk of ‘equivalency’ (Rengifo 1998) of ‘others’, ‘othered’ epis-
temologies and methodologies? Do normalised knowledges and practices have an origin or did they just pop out of the ether fully writ? Well, equivalency can be complicated for those brought up on reason. It seems
to have joined with a lot of other terms in its journey, making up compound terms as permutational equivalence inversional transpositional improper rotation equivalence logical moral dynamic probabilistic equivalence bioequivalence. But the root, the rhizome, whatever botanical metamorphosis we’re working with? Well, one place equivalence seems to have carnated for a time was Latin via
middle and late Latin aequus being equal, and valere meaning to be well or to be worth. So Coyote, all things being equal taken within a situated postprotoeurocontext … Ah, but who is to judge? Who determines the worth the quality? The words do
not evolve themselves outside of human power relations and connotations. But stitching together these words and expressions, companion graduate student
equivalency can be counter productive, and even eating bread with those with
degrees or marks around them at regular intervals who direct their zeal within a system of equal value in a contextually laden axiopraxic multifurcative powered domain can come to naught, or even less if meaning’s primary residence is reason then woe to Alteric the Unready. A bit cumbersome Raven, but I think you’ve captured it quite well. Le nom du jeu is going with the lowest common denominator we have to pre-
pare a prandium that suits all tastes. It could be bland and safe, both/and piquant and risqué, though feel free to add ors where you will. We could search in the realm of mathematics for an algorithm to determine if
there is a proof or even risk assessment for our dilemma before we begin. I say divide and conquer? ‘Survivance’ (Vizenor 1994) of the fittest! The
entscheidungsproblemarbeit is not the angle I would look at dealing with this, and please don’t throw an incompleteness theorem at me. It’s not how we deal with relationality in a peopled environment: it might work if we were numbers but cogito ergo compute is not …
