[analphilosopher] New post at AnalPhilosopher

[analphilosopher at lists.powerblogs.com]

Posted by Keith Burgess-Jackson:
Ambrose Bierce
http://www.analphilosopher.com/posts/1117651018.shtml


   Guillotine, n. A machine which makes a Frenchman shrug his shoulders
   with good reason.

   In his great work on Divergent Lines of Racial Evolution, the learned
   Professor Brayfugle argues from the prevalence of this gesture--the
   shrug--among Frenchmen, that they are descended from turtles and it is
   simply a survival of the habit of retracing the head inside the shell.
   It is with reluctance that I differ with so eminent an authority, but
   in my judgment (as more elaborately set forth and enforced in my work
   entitled Hereditary Emotions--lib. II, c. XI) the shrug is a poor
   foundation upon which to build so important a theory, for previously
   to the Revolution the gesture was unknown. I have not a doubt that it
   is directly referable to the terror inspired by the guillotine during
   the period of that instrument's activity.

   (Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)