[Buddha-l] Re: The arrow: its removal and examination

[Richard Hayes]

On Monday 25 June 2007 03:24, Dhammanando Bhikkhu wrote:

> Chan Fu:
> > Jesus H. Christ, Richard, it's "poring", not "pouring" (as in maple
> > syrup).
>
> Since L is just below P on a qwerty keyboard, presumably "pouring" is a
> typo and Richard really meant that he spent thirty years LOURING over
> his epistemological tomes.

Nice try, Bhante. The truth is that I had no idea that "pore" is a verb. For 
all these years, I have laboured under the apparently false assumption that 
what one pours over a text is one's attentiveness and mindfulness. (Mind you, 
I often enough have poured coffee or tea over my texts, especially when I was 
not pouring attentiveness and mindfulness over them.) It is deeply 
disappointing to me to learn that "pore" is a verb meaning "to gaze 
attentively." It beets me why a language would have the same spelling for a 
verb that means to reed carefully and a noun that means tiny wholes in the 
skin.

To console myself for having made this gaffe for the past several decades, I 
shall in the future gleefully pounce on any students who make this mistake 
and lower their grades for being so abysmally ignorant. I shall add this 
wonderful grade-lowering device to my list of favourites, such as the failure 
to distinguish "principle" from "principal" and the complete inability to 
known when to use "its" and when to use "it's." Students are sew poorly 
educated these daze that their constantly confounding homonyms.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico