Author: Mark Dorset

Cited by

• Eric Kraft (1)
  • IN: Herb 'n' Lorna (1988) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Venn diagrams, named for the English logician John Venn, who devised them in 1880, depict graphically the relationships defined by logical statements about classes of things and, in the words with which the great Polish-American metamathematician Alfred Tarski began his discussion of operations on classes in his Introduction to Logic and to the Methodology of the Deductive Science, "certain operations which, if performed on given classes, yield new classes." Over the years, it has occured to me that a similar kind of diagram, the Dorset Diagram if I may be permitted to call it that, can be used to depict the relationships that certain operations establish between people: specifically the Venn diagram that depicts the product ot the multiplication (in the logical sense) of two classes can be used to depict the product of that complex operation (or, to be more accurate, set of operations) that we call love, operations that join two people, bind them, link them. The linking image is particularly nice, I think, because the diagram resembles two linked rings... Over the years some lovers' circles become so overlapped that only the thinnest crescents of lunes remain at the outer edges... they fill the lens of love so full... become so completely a couple that they belong together in that strong way we acknowledge in things by joining them in speech with 'n' instead of and, as if the attraction between the things joined was so strong, so magnetic, that they had rushed together, crushing their conjunction between them, collapsing it at both ends: flatsam 'n' jetsam, Scotch 'n' soda, ham 'n' swiss, ham 'n' eggs, macaroni 'n' cheese, thunder 'n' lightning, cares 'n' woes, death 'n' taxes, life 'n' times, time 'n' tide, stuff 'n' nonsence, rock 'n' roll, Laurel 'n' Hardy, Mutt 'n' Jeff, mom 'n' pop, Herb 'n' Lorna.
    FROM: The Dorset Diagram and How to Use It, (1988), Fictional, NULL