feminine helicopters, sons, and men

- Regarde, c'est une hélicoptère.
- Non, non, c'est un hélicoptère.
- Mais, comment est-ce que tu vois ça?
~ a joke, HT Suzanne

In Mark's Greek
[Ἀληθῶς {ὁ ἄνθρωπος οὗτος / οὗτος ὁ ἄνθρωπος} υἱὸς {ἦν θεοῦ / θεοῦ ἦν}]
the centurion does not use an article before the word son [υἱὸς] (neither a son nor the son),
and Mark has still never told us what sense Jesus is that son.
~ Three Gospels, page 57, by Reynolds Price

all men are created equal
all men and women are created equal
~Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson
~Declaration of Sentiments, Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The epigraphs to begin this post illustrate what Aristotle despised in the lack of logic and, therefore, in bad language, especially the slyness of female-gendered language.

Aristotle taught that good Greek logic was never ambiguous. And good Greek language ought never to confuse categories, especially the masculine with the feminine. (In many of his writings Aristotle purported to show, in nature, the biological difference between males and females. He also seemed to want to teach how ostensibly, by the cold objective tool of logic, the observer could see females as mutilated males - as necessary freaks of nature that could dangerously pollute and further mutilate the superior sex of men.)

In his book called Rhetoric, Aristotle gives instruction on the logic of good Greek grammar, even with respect to agreement by the category of gender. He writes the following (in what we know as Book III, Chapter 5, sentences 5 and 6, on Bekker page 1407b). There are other examples, but here's one (and I'm giving you three different English translations of it):

A fourth rule is to observe Protagoras' classification of nouns into male, female, and inanimate; for these distinctions also must be correctly given. "Upon her arrival she said her say and departed (e d elthousa kai dialechtheisa ocheto)."
--translated by William Rhys Roberts

The fourth [rule is to observe] Protagoras’ classification of the gender of nouns: masculine, feminine, and neuter. There should be correct grammatical agreement: "Having come and having spoken, she departed."
--translated by George Alexander Kennedy

The fourth rule consists in keeping the genders distinct--masculine, feminine, and neuter, as laid down by Protagoras; these also must be properly introduced: "She, having come (fem.) and having conversed (fem.) with me, went away."
--translated by John Henry Freese

Now, before going further into Aristotle's argument, let me quickly just note with you how the three translators have followed Aristotle's argument (as if what Aristotle as the original author of this original text writes is all that counts). Notice how the translators are afraid to depart from Aristotle's categories.

Yes, they may be respecting us their English language audience; and they may not want to be unclear or unambiguous about what Aristotle wrote; . . . but however nonetheless . . . each of the translators misses the misogyny and gynophobia in Aristotle's writings. As if showing the phallogocentric bias of Aristotle will somehow make the translation a hardship on either Aristotle or his readers. (Do we not know that Aristotle never intended that any of us barbarians, or females, would ever read or hear what he wrote? He did not write for you. He considered you less than the elite male Greek student who may some day conquer the world.)

Translator Roberts is so careful, he actually transliterates the Greek for us. We can hear, perhaps, how Aristotle or one of his students might have read it aloud. We can be his audience.

Translator Kennedy gives us readers his 63rd footnote to explain exactly what Aristotle must mean: "In Greek, the participles modifying 'she' have distinct feminine forms."

Translator Freese marks the English translated text for us with his "(fem.)" twice. And he also gives a footnote to explain his translation of Aristotle's word σκεύη as our neuter, noting: "'inanimate things,' the classification probably being male, female, and inanimate, not the grammatical one of masculine, feminine, and neuter."

Roberts, Kennedy, and Freese participate in Aristotle's logic. And much gets lost in their phallogocentric translations. None seems to want to recognize Aristotle’s blatant sexism, his logical absolutism, and his elitist centrism in his writings in general and in this Greek grammar lesson here in particular. Each seems to insist on clear and unambiguous categories. "Either / or" logic works fine.

So let's look ourselves a little closer at Aristotle's language. Let's listen in (as Krista Ratcliffe suggests) with intent but not necessarily and only to his intent. Remember, his intent is to exclude you and me. His intent is to use logic that would classify any female as not a male and any barbarian as not a Greek, with females inferior to males and non-Greeks below Greeks. His review of the categories - the "canons" - of rhetoric was to exclude listening (notes Ratcliffe).

First, let's look at the supposedly troublesome issues in the language of the epigraphs above. Second, we'll return to what's going on in Aristotle's Greek-language lesson.

First, then, the categories in the three excerpts of language above are not so closed. Aristotle, however, wants categories in "nature" and in "logic" and in "language" to be purely one thing while absolutely not the other thing.

Women and females are troubling to Aristotle, in that regard; they are not men and are not males, not pure human beings. Likewise, as in the joke that Suzanne shares, French is troubling for many English speakers and readers (with the joke being clearly ambiguous for the French: not purely feminine-or-masculine and not the same spoken-vs-written).

Ancient biblical Greek - yes, Mark's Greek (a translation of a Latin speaker and maybe of the disciple Peter's Hebrew Aramaic remembering) is barbaric. It's barbaric because what the reader reads is not clearly a specific indefinite son (not necessary "a son"). But worse: it's barbaric because "sons" often refers to "daughters" in Mark's writings and also in the Jews' Hellene translations and writings of their scriptures. Mark's Greek uses a "both / and" logic.

And American English speakers (of the USA variety) want so badly for Thomas Jefferson, the original author of the extant Declaration of Independence, to be clear. The Declaration says one thing, and is not to be watered down into just anything. But "all men" must surely mean to Jefferson more than all men - because all men surely means more than blackslave-and-blackfemaleslave-owning males, who are irked at the King of England for not, among other things, helping them fight "the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." Is the English phrase "all men" inclusive of "women" and of "black men and women" and of "red women and men" and so forth?

Second, now, how about Aristotle and his would-be un-ambiguous Greek? What we may need to know is that Aristotle's notes on rhetoric are for his male-only, elite Greek students (being trained, among other things, for politics and world conquest).

Aristotle uses an example for these young men from the language of Protagoras. This is downright strange. Protagoras is a sophist, a slippery rhetorician, someone whose language and logic is about as polluted as a woman's, according to Aristotle. Historian Edward Schiappa says that "Protagoras used a both/and logic. . . . To him experience was rich and variable enough to be capable of multiple—and even inconsistent—accounts" (Protagoras and Logos: A Study in Greek Philosophy and Rhetoric, page 193). Aristotle, in contrast, taught directly against "Protagorean relativism"; Aristotle taught that one must "argue from an either/or logic" of dominant singularity so that "if two parties disagree about what-is and what-is-not, one of the parties must be mistaken ([Metaphysics] 1063a)" (page 191). On the very principle of non-contradiction, it is strange that Aristotle uses a quotation from Protagoras (who has bad writing and bad logos) to demonstrate the logic of grammatical gender agreement in Aristotle's own lessons of Good Greek by Good Logic.

What is not immediately clear is whether Aristotle is attempting irony when he says that Protagoras sets the good-Greek rules about grammatical agreement with respect to gender. Or perhaps his quotation is from Protagoras but the rule is Aristotle’s applied to the sentence. And maybe Protagoras creates the rule, which his sophism renders meaningless in its contradiction of Aristotle’s logic.

WHEW!

So, what if we translated a bit to show how Aristotle fails to be air-tight with his categories and with his logic?

Here's what Aristotle writes below what I've rendered into English language. Both the English and what Aristotle writes are playful (despite Aristotle's attempts to control and to eliminate the play - what he considers undesirable illogical barbarism and feminism):

Four, as Protagoras does:
the birth-family of the
naming-words by sex:

male and female and thing.

One ought, in fact, to give this out straight:

"having femininely arrived

having womanishly talked
so loquaciously

she left . ."

τέταρτον, ὡς Πρωταγόρας:
τὰ γένη τῶν ὀνομάτων διῄρει:

ἄρρενα καὶ θήλεα καὶ σκεύη

δεῖ γὰρ ἀποδιδόναι καὶ ταῦτα ὀρθῶς:

"ἡ δ' ἐλθοῦσα

καὶ διαλεχθεῖσα

ᾤχετο"

To be clear, all speakers and readers of Greek would not view Aristotle’s grammar problem to be any real problem at all. Very obviously the feminine parts (i.e., the suffixes) on each of the verbals imply a feminine subject so that the three verbals agree in gender. By Aristotle’s anti-Protagorean implication, the feminine gender cannot be both feminine and not feminine (i.e., either masculine or neuter). Thus, this sentence by Protagoras is hardly Aristotle's argument for good Greek grammar as much as it is Aristotle’s own rhetoric for non-contradictory logic. It's an unwittingly sly argument against being sly in language. Whoops, it's an aristotelian contradiction. Whoops.

In addition, since Aristotle is naming Protagoras to argue against the sophist's messy relativism, then Aristotle is doing something else. He seems to be arguing against Plato, Socrates, Pericles, and the woman Aspasia as well. Without too much of a stretch, the reader can see how the feminine verbal διαλεχθει̂σα (transliterated "dialechtheisa"), in Protagoras's sentence, falls within the same semantic range as the feminine nominal διαλεκτική (transliterated "dialektike"). And Aristotle parts ways with his teacher Plato on the point of dialectic, the very loquacious feminine method that Aspasia herself uses and teaches as good uses of logos and Hellene language, to men such as Socrates and Pericles and Protagoras. Aristotle's language plays with dialectic by (perhaps unwittingly and punningly) invoking dialectic--his intention presumably (and the intention of most of his logical English translators too) is to avoid feminine categories unless he can determine what they must be. Aristotle doesn't want listening and interactive talking. He wants no gendered play on words. No feminine helicopters, no feminine sons, no feminine men.

Anne Carson and Anne Lamott on Resurrection

Listen to silly Anne Lamott and foolish Anne Carson, wanting hoping desiring so gullibly to keep open the historic and literary possibilities of resurrection, as women see it. The one Anne speaks of Jesus, the other Anne of another Greek-fabled drama, Alcestis in Alcestis by Euripides.

Euripides, of course, is that one of whom the Historian F. A. Wright, in his Feminism in Greek Literature from Homer to Aristotle says: “Euripides and Plato are almost the only [male] authors who show any true appreciation of a woman's real qualities, and to Euripides and Plato, Aristotle, by the whole trend of his [sexist, bigoted] prejudices, was opposed.” But I’m reading the “scholarship” of another “historian” (supposedly) who scoffs, like Aristotle, at true appreciation of a woman’s views. I’m talking about James F. McGrath and his newly published book The Burial of Jesus: History and Faith. McGrath is crying for reviews, but not this one here. In his book, again and again (on more than a dozen pages so far), McGrath feels like he has to pooh pooh the inclusion of women as credible witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus in the gospel of Mark. Not surprising. His historiography is straight phallogocentrism. What I mean by that is this. Hélène Cixous, in her book Stigmata: escaping texts, translates and quotes “Clarice Lispector, who did not think in terms of phallogocentrism.” Cixous points out that Lispector provides a definition of the term: “We have seen this before; it is the ‘phallocratic system’ . . . this is how she [Lispector] conceives of it: a ‘system of inflexible last judgment, which does not permit even a second of incredulity’” (123). Now the English translation of Cixous’s French translation of Lispector’s Brazilian Portuguese has yielded the term. The three together have made “phal-” from Aristotle’s φαλλικὰ (“ph-a-l-l-ika”); “logo,” from Aristotle’s λόγος (or “l-o-g-os”) which he himself makes (by) his λογική (or “l-o-g-ikē” aka LOGIC); and “centric” from Aristotle’s κεντρική (or “k-e-n-tr-ikē”). McGrath, like father Aristotle, does not permit even a second of incredulity. He redefines “faith” and “history” under the guise of “religion.” Enough of that then.

Here’s Anne Lamott in Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith:

I don't have the right personality for Good Friday, for the crucifixion: I'd like to skip ahead to the resurrection. In fact, I'd like to skip ahead to the resurrection vision of one of the kids in our Sunday school, who drew a picture of the Easter Bunny outside the tomb: everlasting life, and a basket full of chocolates. Now you’re talking.

In Jesus’ real life, the resurrection came two days later, but in our real lives, it can be weeks, years, and you never know for sure that it will come. I don’t have the right personality for the human condition, either. But I believe in the resurrection, in Jesus’, and in ours. The trees, so stark and gray last month, suddenly went up as if in flame, but instead in blossoms and leaves--poof! Like someone opening an umbrella. It’s often hard to find similar dramatic evidence of rebirth and hope in our daily lives. (140).

Here’s Anne Carson in Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides:

What does Alkestis' resurrection mean for the sacrificial contract that Admetos had negotiated with Death? This question is never addressed in the play. Mathematically Death is down one soul; common sense (what the Greeks call Necessity) tells us such a situation can’t last. But Herakles seems a character able to override common sense. He releases Alkestis simply by choosing to do so. As if to say, within every death a life stands waiting to be set free, should anyone have the nerve to do it. As if to say, try looking deep into a house, a marriage, or an idea like Necessity and you will see clear through to the other side. Death, like tragedy, is a game with rules. Why not just break the rules?

Rules broken by Euripides in Alkestis include the rule of closure. What are we to make of the ending? Can we be sure the veiled women is alive? that she is Alkestis? that she will live happily ever after with her husband and children? Critics have doubted all these. There is a kind of nuptial drama staged in the final scene--perhaps a parody of the ancient Greek wedding, which centered upon an unveiling of the bride before the eyes of her husband and some exchange of words between them--that stalls oddly at its peak moment. Here the bride is unveiled to her husband at 971/1121 (or so it seems to me; critics doubt this too) but she will not be permitted to speak for three days due to her death-polluted condition. An eerie silence carries her into the big dark house of her unconventional husband.

I find I want to say less rather than more about Alkestis. Not because there is less in this play but because the surface has a speed and shine that evaporate with exegesis, like some of [Alfred] Hitchcock’s plots. Or a trembling of laughter, terrible if it broke out. (248-49)

The Last 2 Posts

Fair enough.  I need to explain, perhaps, what I'm intending by the last two posts.

Here's the more general context, and then I'll get to my last two posts specifically.  With my pair of posts, I'm trying to respond to the suggestions of two different bloggers that God doesn't need gender.  Or, rather, that we, in our talk about deity and other such personal things, can go "beyond gender."  These blogger dialogues get to more than just the question of whether the God, or even a god or goddess, is "he or she" or just "it."  The conversations betray the fact that our frame for the conversations, our methods for knowing and for talking, are primarily male.  (Even feminist scholars--such as Carol Poster and Gesa E. Kirsch and Joy S. Ritchie--can unwittingly find themselves in male-framed "beyond-the-personal" arguments and conversations, trying ironically to oppose the impersonal oppositional male.)  I'm trying to respond to the following:  (1) John Hobbins' post "Is the biblical God a persona beyond gender?" in which he is joined by Rabbi David E. S. Stein, discussing the latter's article “On Beyond Gender: Representation of God in the Torah and in Three Recent Renditions into English”; and (2) David Ker's post "Holy Spirit: it or he?" in which he concludes (in a concluding comment):

I favor "it" except for when "spirit" is a synecdoche for God or counselor, advocate, etc. then I would choose "he."

"She" is way too controversial for me and in fact I don't think it is really addressing the "genderlessness" of the spirit as a component of a person. Are my feet feminine and my arms masculine if I am a speaker of Spanish? Is my soul feminine but my spirit masculine?

They've kindly responded to comments I and others have made on their respective blogs. But I wanted to try to say something, differently.

So my last two posts take two different songs I heard on the iPod of one of my children. Listening, I didn't know the band singing was Relient K. I was listening in, not invited at all to listen. I was eavesdropping, overhearing, being a fly on the wall so to speak. My son didn't know I was checking out his music. And the boys who make up Relient K didn't write their songs for me. I'm not even sure who the audience is, or whether I'm "interpreting" their original lyrics by the original author's intentions.

What I hear when listening to the one song and then the other is something that reminds me of my own relationship with my fathers. I have a birth father, a man I love who was not an easy Dad when I was a boy. Because I went off to boarding school as a kid, I have other fathers, and sometimes I hear and read the language of God as Father. I have friends, cousins, brothers and sisters, and a spouse who have and who have had similar kinds of fathers. Many of us are children of the Christian clergy, of pastors, and preachers, and missionaries. We hear and read stories such as the Prodigal Son and the loving Father, which has not always been our experience, at least the "loving Father" part. Some of us have been prodigal children--children who have left forever by committing suicide or by running away or by dwindling away in acts of "acting out" in different ways, and children or adults who have returned in various ways.

Some of us have walked through Twelve Steps. This is a different sort of "recovery" work than academics, especially feminist academics, must do. And yet "recovery" in many contexts gets one to acknowledge the body, and its pain, and how it was silenced, gendered, marked and unmarked. (Some feminist scholars, like Beth Daniell, are in recovery work both in the academy and "in meetings." Other feminists, like the grad student doing research on AA at a conference I recently attended, say that Twelve Steps--especially because God, the male, is the higher power and male-ish hierarchy--are patently anti-female). The Steps are very difficult in that they require safety, and anonymity, and feelings not necessarily analysis, and most of all community. They are also almost invariably indirect methods to something else.

This is some the indirectness I'm after in those last two posts. C. S. Lewis talks of deep change being the difference of a direct coat of paint and furniture stain. Kenneth L. Pike would tell a poem at the end of his monolingual demonstration and the subsequent lecture because poetry is as indirect. Eve Ensler writes the Vagina Monologues, translated now in forty five different languages and performed in more than one hundred different nations, to change the world? Yes, and to change the rapist and the men who have grown up after committing incest, and of course then to help the victims, (y)our sisters, mothers, wives, aunts, grandmothers, granddaughters, and daughters.

So my last two posts are monologic dialogues for indirect change, if possible somehow for recovery. At the end of her Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance, Cheryl Glenn talks about having to "share an incredible sadness, for the recuperation of past women's voices is a work of morning." And, she continues,

We survivors-scholars-women-men often grieve, especially if we are exploring periods or individuals for whom records are scarce. But we must experience and then move beyond grief over irrevocable loss and move beyond a yearning for the actual person whose remains will never adequately represent her.

Notice that in her moving "beyond" there can never be a moving beyond the personal, the pathos, the gendered. For it's the fuller gendered person who is being recovered.

I'm also playing, in my last two posts, with my own fictional/factual literal/figural contrasts: the father is prodigal, and abba is (m)othering. Sloppy ambiguous experiential in-progress human language helps.

Aristotle: "Avoid Ambiguities"

I. Aristotle’s Most Straightforward Word

Aristotle is sounding a lot like my linguist friend Richard Rhodes again. In Book III, Chapter 5, of the Rhetoric, Aristotle starts in on “correctness of language,” or “grammatical correctness,” or “purity” depending on who’s doing the translating into English. Then Aristotle (quite objectively mind you) gives five rules to make a speech or a written composition “easy to read and therefore easy to deliver.” (Aristotle also disparages five other people as examples of poor communicators who break the five rules). If I can make this post easy to read, then let me focus on just a single rule, Rule #3: “Avoid Ambiguities.” The questions we might ask are these: (a) whether we can meet Aristotle’s standards for “correctness of language,” (b) specifically whether we can even keep Rule #3 and “avoid ambiguities,” and (c) whether Aristotle really was better at communicating by his own standards than the people he names as bad communicators.

II. the outline

And let me spell out the intended outline for this blog post: I. (above) is my introduction with thesis statement at the end. II. (here then) I give this blog outline. III. (below) I’ll give all my blogger friend Lingamish needs to read (in English) first. IV. (then below that) I’ll give the clearest we’ve got from Aristotle in his Greek. V. (next) We’ll look at the word Aristotle uses for “ambiguities” so as to have his students avoid them. VI. (following that) We’ll look at how Homer and Hesiod used that word, and how the earliest Bible translators used that term. VII. We’ll foolishly conjecture about the difference an afrafeminist translation might make. VIII. Finally, we’ll offer some conclusions, hoping allthewhile we’ve avoided ambiguities and have been otherwise correct and have written something (again) that is easy to read, for that is the goal of all good writing and good translation of the Greek isn’t it?

III. the English translation (from Rhys Roberts)

Such, then, are the ingredients of which speech is composed. The foundation of good style is correctness of language, which falls under five heads…

The third is to avoid ambiguities; unless, indeed, you definitely desire to be ambiguous, as those do who have nothing to say but are pretending to mean something. Such people are apt to put that sort of thing into verse. Empedocles, for instance, by his long circumlocutions imposes on his hearers; these are affected in the same way as most people are when they listen to diviners, whose ambiguous utterances are received with nods of acquiescence –

“Croesus by crossing the Halys will ruin a mighty realm.”

[1407b] Diviners use these vague generalities about the matter in hand because their predictions are thus, as a rule, less likely to be falsified. We are more likely to be right, in the game of "odd and even," if we simply guess "even" or "odd" than if we guess at the actual number; and the oracle-monger is more likely to be right if he simply says that a thing will happen than if he says when it will happen, and therefore he refuses to add a definite date. All these ambiguities have the same sort of effect, and are to be avoided unless we have some such object as that mentioned.

…It is a general rule that a written composition should be easy to read and therefore easy to deliver.

IV. Aristotle’s Clear Greek (which you’d think should be τὸ ἑλληνίζειν )

ὁ μὲν οὐ̂ν λόγος συντίθεται ἐκ τούτων, ἔστι δ’ ἀρχὴ τη̂ς λέξεως τὸ ἑλληνίζειν : του̂το δ’ ἐστὶν ἐν πέντε,…

τρίτον μὴ ἀμφιβόλοις . του̂το δ’ ἂν μὴ τἀναντία προαιρη̂ται, ὅπερ ποιου̂σιν ὅταν μηδὲν μὲν ἔχωσι λέγειν, προσποιω̂νται δέ τι λέγειν: οἱ γὰρ τοιου̂τοι ἐν ποιήσει λέγουσιν ταυ̂τα, οἱ̂ον ̓Εμπεδοκλη̂ς: φενακίζει γὰρ τὸ κύκλῳ πολὺ ὄν, καὶ πάσχουσιν οἱ ἀκροαταὶ ὅπερ οἱ πολλοὶ παρὰ τοι̂ς μάντεσιν: ὅταν γὰρ λέγωσιν ἀμφίβολα, συμπαρανεύουσιν—

Κροι̂σος ̔́Αλυν διαβὰς μεγάλην ἀρχὴν καταλύσει

[1407b] --καὶ διὰ τὸ ὅλως ἔλαττον εἰ̂ναι ἁμάρτημα διὰ τω̂ν γενω̂ν του̂ πράγματος λέγουσιν οἱ μάντεις: τύχοι γὰρ ἄν τις μα̂λλον ἐν τοι̂ς ἀρτιασμοι̂ς ἄρτια ἢ περισσὰ εἰπὼν μα̂λλον ἢ πόσα ἔχει, καὶ τὸ ὅτι ἔσται ἢ τὸ πότε, διὸ οἱ χρησμολόγοι οὐ προσορίζονται τὸ πότε . ἅπαντα δὴ ταυ̂τα ὅμοια, ὥστ’ ἂν μὴ τοιούτου τινὸς ἕνεκα, φευκτέον.

…ὅλως δὲ δει̂ εὐανάγνωστον εἰ̂ναι τὸ γεγραμμένον καὶ εὔφραστον

V. Aristotle’s Word for “Ambiguities”

As we all can see, Aristotle’s word for “ambiguities” is clearly ἀμφιβόλοις (which we can transliterate amphibolois) or its variant ἀμφίβολα (which we can transliterate amphibola). And, indeed, George A. Kennedy translates Aristotle’s Rule #3 this way: “Third is not to use amphibolies.” Lest that’s not clear enough, Kennedy provides his English readers here his footnote 61: “An amphiboly (lit. ‘what shoots both ways’) is an equivocation based on a word or phrase with an ambiguous meaning, often creating a fallacious argument; see 3.18.5.” (So, for the sake of clarity, let’s pretend we don’t see the circularity in Kennedy’s footnote’s argument). Clear enough? Good.

VI.A. Ancient Poets’ Uses of His Word for “Ambiguities”

Don’t we wish the ancient poet Sappho had used the word, as ambiguous as the fragments of her writings to us seem today? I’ll have to admit to blogger friend Suzanne that the closest I’ve found is this fragment as quoted by Hermogenes and then by Demetrius long after she was gone: αμφὶ δ᾽ ὔδωρ. (And this doesn’t even explain why the variant text Anne Carson translates is instead this: ἐν δ᾽ ὔδωρ).

Not to worry, the writings of the ancient men are much better preserved! Here’s Homer first and then Hesiod.

The Illiad (17, line 742; and 23, line 97):

οἳ δ' ὥς θ' ἡμίονοι κρατερὸν μένος ἀμφιβαλόντες

ἀλλά μοι ἆσσον στῆθι: μίνυνθά περ ἀμφιβαλόντε

The Odyssey (6, line 178; 17, line 344; 22, line 103; and 23, line 192):

ἄστυ δέ μοι δεῖξον, δὸς δὲ ῥάκος ἀμφιβαλέσθαι,

καὶ κρέας, ὥς οἱ χεῖρες ἐχάνδανον ἀμφιβαλόντι

αὐτός τ' ἀμφιβαλεῦμαι ἰών, δώσω δὲ συβώτῃ

τῷ δ' ἐγὼ ἀμφιβαλὼν θάλαμον δέμον, ὄφρ' ἐτέλεσσα,

Work and Days (of Hesiod, lines 545 and 787):

ὑετοῦ ἀμφιβάλῃ ἀλέην: κεφαλῆφι δ' ὕπερθεν

σηκόν τ' ἀμφιβαλεῖν ποιμνήϊον ἤπιον ἦμαρ

So how to translate these (and still avoid ambiguities)? Well, Sappho is talking about the coolness “wrapped around” the waters, we infer. And that’s just not good enough. So here’s what the men of literature are saying.

The Illiad (17, line 742; and 23, line 97):

driving strength “thrown around” the mules;

an “embrace around” a brother by another brother.

The Odyssey (6, line 178; 17, line 344; 22, line 103; and 23, line 192):

clothing to be thrown around our hero by the queen;

hands thrown around a whole loaf and pork to eat;

hands thrown around helmet, a shield, and two spears;

a chamber compartment put around a make-shift shelter.

Work and Days (lines 545 and 787):

a raincoat thrown over one’s back to keep one dry;

a fence built around a sheep pen.

VI.B. 1st Bible Translators Uses of His Word for “Ambiguities”

Well, without further adu, let’s leave the silly poets with all their throwing around and over and all their putting around these “ambiguities.” They don’t have Aristotle to critique or to correct them yet.

Let’s get to the first Bible translators, who were commissioned in the great city that Aristotle’s great student established: Alexandria. Here’s how these Jews translated the old Hebrew (albeit some poetry) into newer Greek:

Psalms 141:10 (aka 140:10 for the LXX)

πεσοῦνται ἐν ἀμφιβλήστρῳ αὐτοῦ ἁμαρτωλοί κατὰ μόνας εἰμὶ ἐγὼ ἕως οὗ ἂν παρέλθω

Ecclesiastes (aka Qoheleth for the LXX) 9:12

ὅτι καί γε οὐκ ἔγνω ὁ ἄνθρωπος τὸν καιρὸν αὐτοῦ ὡς οἱ ἰχθύες οἱ θηρευόμενοι ἐν ἀμφιβλήστρῳ κακῷ καὶ ὡς ὄρνεα τὰ θηρευόμενα ἐν παγίδι ὡς αὐτὰ παγιδεύονται οἱ υἱοὶ το ῦἀνθρώπου εἰς καιρὸν πονηρόν ὅταν ἐπιπέσῃ ἐπ αὐτοὺς ἄφνω

Isaiah 19:8

καὶ στενάξουσιν οἱ ἁλεεῖς καὶ στενάξουσιν πάντες οἱ βάλλοντες ἄγκιστρον εἰς τὸν ποταμόν καὶ οἱ βάλλοντες σαγήνας καὶ οἱ ἀμφιβολεῖς πενθήσουσιν

Habakkuk 1:15, 16, 17

συντέλειαν ἐν ἀγκίστρῳ ἀνέσπασεν καὶ εἵλκυσεν αὐτὸν ἐν ἀμφιβλήστρῳ καὶ συνήγαγεν αὐτὸν ἐν ταῖς σαγήναις αὐτοῦ ἕνεκεν τούτου εὐφρανθήσεται καὶ χαρήσεται ἡ καρδία αὐτοῦ

ἕνεκεν τούτου θύσει τῇ σαγήνῃ αὐτοῦ καὶ θυμιάσει τῷ ἀμφιβλήστρῳ αὐτοῦ ὅτι ἐν αὐτοῖς ἐλίπανεν μερίδα αὐτοῦ καὶ τὰ βρώματα αὐτοῦ ἐκλεκτά

διὰ τοῦτο ἀμφιβαλεῖ τὸ ἀμφίβληστρον αὐτοῦ καὶ διὰ παντὸς ἀποκτέννειν ἔθνη οὐ φείσεται

And here’s how a couple of followers of Joshua (aka Jesus) used even newer Greek including Aristotle’s old word:

Matthew 4:18

περιπατῶν δὲ παρὰ τὴν θάλασσαν τῆς Γαλιλαίας εἶδεν δύο ἀδελφούς Σίμωνα τὸν λεγόμενον Πέτρον καὶ Ἀνδρέαν τὸν ἀδελφὸν αὐτοῦ βάλλοντας ἀμφίβληστρον εἰς τὴν θάλασσαν ἦσαν γὰρ ἁλιεῖς

Mark 1:16

καὶ παράγων παρὰ τὴν θάλασσαν τῆς Γαλιλαίας εἶδεν Σίμωνα καὶ Ἀνδρέαν τὸν ἀδελφὸν Σίμωνος ἀμφιβάλλοντας ἐν τῇ θαλάσσῃ ἦσαν γὰρ ἁλιεῖς

By now, it should be clear that the word Aristotle seems to use for “ambiguities” the straightforward term that beginning Bible translators use for “fish nets.”

VII. Foolish Ambiguous (Feminist) Conjecture

Now, let’s imagine. Let’s imagine that Pythias and Pythias (Aristotle’s first wife and their daughter) pick up a copy of Aristotle’s Rhetoric one day while he is off at the academy teaching the boys. Let’s imagine they read what we’ve read in our section IV above. Let’s imagine that Pythias says to her mother Pythias (in the Hellene mother tongue, of course): “Mom, why does Dad say ‘No Throw-Wraps’ when speaking or writing”? Would the girl be so foolish to imagine her mother might agree that Aristotle is using a word that poets have used to throw a wrap around a body? Isn’t there ambiguity here that they and the poets are creating? One single word is thrown around so many different bodies: 1) coolness wrapped around a body of water; 2) driving strength thrown around the body of beasts; 3) siblings’ arms thrown around one another in a hug; 4) the queen’s clothing granted around our hero’s tired physique; 5) hungry grateful hands on satisfying bread and sweet pig meat; 6) an entire warring wardrobe fit well on one mighty-fit warrior; 7) a room of one’s own (with furniture perhaps); 8) a London-Fog style overcoat; 9) a secure place to keep the sheep; and (with a great stretch of the imagination for the future) 10) a bunch of fish nets (and this is well before anyone imagined fish-net stockings).

VII. Conclusion

I wish I could conclude here the way Kenneth L Pike does: with a poem. But there’s too much ambiguity in that, and besides it was the poets who started all the confusion in the first place. I’m really afraid we’re going to have to end by saying Aristotle finds himself in a pickle here. No wonder the objectivist never showed his Rhetoric to the girls at home. No wonder he silences those females. No wonder he teaches the educated boys τὸ ἑλληνίζειν (or “pure correct Greek”) by μὴ ἀμφιβόλοις.