Who first said “ontology precedes epistemology”?

William and Wanda wonder…

William: Who first said, “ontology precedes epistemology”?

Wanda: Heidegger or someone like that?

William: I can’t find anyone to positively quote as the original source.

Wanda: I was looking up “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” recently. Seems to come from the 1930s but no clear source. Proverbs create the same confusion. “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Can’t attribute that.

William: Some proverbs can be sourced though. “The pen is mightier than the sword." Edward Bulwer Lytton.

Wanda: And then there are those maxims that are inspirational. “Change is the only constant.” Non-attributable I’m sure.

William: Actually, that seems to have been Heraclitus. Somebody might have said it even before him. But these days there are source police who watch out for misattributions. Reza Aslan got flagged for quoting a story as being from Buddha. “If you want to draw water you do not dig six one-foot wells. You dig one six-foot well.” Apparently it wasn't.

__________

Voice-over

In the age of plagiarism police, protect yourself…

Three possibilities for sources are:

• attribution
• no attribution
• wrong attribution

...

From messaging to e-books: Channels and editing

No house should ever be ON a hill.  It should be OF the hill.

Two fusty but feisty academics rue the demise of edited writing.

Ac 01: "I went looking for a quote on architecture. There was the usual wisdom from the greats, like Frank Lloyd Wright saying, 'No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.' Then there was a bunch of quotes from celebrities, there was one from a some singer who was quoted as saying 'Architecture? Yes, that’s something I like.'”

Ac 02: Huh. I know what you mean. A banal spoken aside gets listed as a famous quote just because it came out of a mouth that thousands of teenagers go to see at a rock concert?

____________

Voice-over

Dredging through the amount of banal spoken speech recorded as written speech is becoming daunting.

Was something lost when we stopped deciphering the squiggles of print and instead began squinting at digital flickers?

And in writing, does a thrown together salad count for more than a measured slice of sashimi? Is the contemporary digital-driven preference for the short and sharp the victory of the Spontaneous over the Rehearsed?

Perhaps it just depends on where you are looking.

The table below suggests a continuum: informal to formal; short to long, staccato to smooth, bullet points to reasoned argument and creative writing… The medium shapes the message.

message	email	microblog	blog	website	e-book
private	private	public (private)	public (private)	public	public
SMS, WhatsApp, LINE	@gmail, @yahoo, Outlook	Twitter	blogspot	.com	-

Quote, unquote

Sven does this often. May asks why.

...

Sven: I do it when I am using someone else’s words. It means “quote, unquote.”

May: Don’t you say who said it?

Sven: I usually don’t know who said it. I go quote unquote when I think it’s a common expression.

May: Shouldn’t you use your left hand for “quote” and right hand for “unquote”?We write left to right.

Sven: I’m left-handed.

___________

Voiceover

Body language extended to punctuation? Does anyone know of any other examples? Do we use body language for a full stop (period)? For a comma? For a capital letter? No wonder academics get a bad name for paper titles like “Punctuation as a Reflection of Late-Period Existential Angst.”

...