{"id":1327,"date":"2009-04-15T07:39:46","date_gmt":"2009-04-15T11:39:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=1327"},"modified":"2009-04-15T10:45:04","modified_gmt":"2009-04-15T14:45:04","slug":"the-shyness-of-architects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=1327","title":{"rendered":"The shyness of architects"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Martin Filler, \"<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/articles\/22637\">Maman's Boy<\/a>\", New York Review of Books 56(7), 4\/30\/2009<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\">[Frank Lloyd] Wright's self-portrait as a heroic individualist served as the prototype for Howard Roark, the architect-protagonist of Ayn Rand's 1943 best-seller, <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">The Fountainhead<\/span>. But the novelist transmogrified Wright's entertaining egotism into Roark's suffocating megalomania, an image closer to that of another contemporary coprofessional: Le Corbusier, the pseudonymous Swiss-French architect and urbanist born Charles-\u00c9douard Jeanneret in 1887, twenty years after Wright.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Successful architects are generally not shy, apparently, and Le Corbu was even less shy than the others. But wait:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\">Most architects give lectures primarily to advertise themselves, and Le Corbusier was no less shy than his colleagues in basing his talks on his own work.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>So in addition to being even less shy than his colleagues, he was also no less shy than his colleagues?<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->If you're having trouble, try it this way &#8212; to be <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">less shy<\/span> is to be <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">more bold<\/span>, or <em>bolder<\/em>; was Le Corbusier <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">bolder than his colleagues<\/span> in promoting his own work in his lectures, or <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">no bolder than his colleagues<\/span>?<\/p>\n<p>We've <a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?s=overnegation\">often<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/search?source=ig&amp;hl=en&amp;rlz=&amp;=&amp;q=site%3Aitre.cis.upenn.edu+undernegation&amp;btnG=Google+Search\">observed<\/a> that the interaction among negatives and scalar predicates tends to wind up off by one or pointing in the wrong direction. \u00a0Unless I'm missing some subtle scope ambiguity, Martin Filler and the NYRB editors have contributed another example to our collection.<\/p>\n<p>[hat tip to John V. Burke]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Martin Filler, \"Maman's Boy\", New York Review of Books 56(7), 4\/30\/2009 [Frank Lloyd] Wright's self-portrait as a heroic individualist served as the prototype for Howard Roark, the architect-protagonist of Ayn Rand's 1943 best-seller, The Fountainhead. But the novelist transmogrified Wright's entertaining egotism into Roark's suffocating megalomania, an image closer to that of another contemporary coprofessional: [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-semantics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1327\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}