This is the relaxing blog of Michael Dembinski, musing on life from the vantage-point of an intriguing Warsaw suburb.

Here is a clever idea he’s had: to find photographs from contemporary Poland somehow suggesting life under communism, as if nothing has changed.

And his blogroll led me to Jacek Koba, who looks at English with a beady logician’s eye:

Why do we think that Portia’s line in the Merchant of Venice: ‘All that glitters is not gold’ (‘glisters’ actually) says that there are things that glitter, yet which are not gold? The line does not say this explicitly. This is what we want it to say.

Strictly speaking, what it says is that whatever glitters is not gold. This is not true, because gold does glitter, or at least some gold glitters. As it stands, the sentence conforms to the E-type proposition on the square of oppositions, Aristotelian or modern. E-type propositions are of the kind: No A are B. A paraphrase of Portia’s line then would be: ‘Nothing that glitters is gold.’ Alternatively, ‘It is not the case that there exist things that glitter and are gold.’

What we want is an O-type proposition: ‘There exist things that glitter and are not gold,’ or, which is the same thing, ‘Not everything that glitters is gold,’ with the negation pushed out in front of a universally quantified sentence.

Blimey.