3-20-89 Monday. The Wizard of Oz [1939] was on television last night, so naturally I tuned in. As usual, I saw something new in it, this time sarcasm. To be sarcastic is to taunt someone (though philosophers of language mean something more by it—namely, meaning the opposite of what one says). In the scene in which they meet the Tin Man, Dorothy and the Scarecrow see apples on a tree and begin to pick them. The tree turns out to be a person of some kind, however, complete with eyes, nose, and mouth, and yells at them. When the Scarecrow tells the tree that Dorothy didn’t want any apples anyway, the tree asks, in a gruff voice, “Are you implying my apples ain’t what they oughta be?”. The Scarecrow replies: “No, it’s just that she doesn’t like little green worms.” The tree charges after them. Although I can’t reproduce the Scarecrow’s intonation and inflection here, it’s clear that he is being sarcastic to the tree. This got me to wondering about how sarcasm is learned. It’s clearly a social skill, in the sense that we learn how to use it, do use it, and are subjected to it. But nobody ever explains sarcasm to children; somehow they pick it up on their own, through observation and imitation. They see that the Scarecrow angered the tree, wonder why, and come to the conclusion that the Scarecrow did indeed imply that the apples on the tree were wormy. The only difference between what was said on this occasion and what was said on other occasions is that the Scarecrow’s intonation and inflection differ. It is through movies like this that children learn sarcasm.
I had another long day at the office. But as I told one of my students, it doesn’t seem to drag on, probably because I’m so busy and have such well-spaced breaks between classes. This evening I lectured to my philosophy of law students on the economic analysis of law. It hasn’t been that long—the fall of 1983—since I sat in a similar course and listened to Jules Coleman explain the basics of Pareto superiority and optimality, the Kaldor-Hicks criterion of efficiency, the Coase theorem, Posner’s market-mimicking principle, and Calabresi and Melamed’s rules for protecting entitlements. What fun! I used only one graph tonight—a utility-possibility frontier—to explain the concepts, because I think that economics can and should be done in English, not mathematics or geometry. The graph seemed to help some students, as it does me, but others may have been confused. I told them that if it gets confusing, they should stick to the verbal explanation. All in all, we had an illuminating discussion. I didn’t get to the application part of the lecture, so I’ll conclude the discussion next week. I plan to apply the economic concepts to nuisance law.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 