Sorry I missed the humour in that, Moose. If you had written “Marshal McLuhan”
I might have caught on :-)
And if you had put it in quotes the tenses would not have mattered, but you
reported it and McLuhan said it then, not now, so “is” is wrong. I don’t think
that you could attribute prophesy to his sayings, whether or not they had
validity then. And, to me, that saying sounds a bit trite now when you
consider the myriad media available.
Chris
(even more of a pedant, as well you know . . . ;-))
> On 13 Nov 14, at 06:42, Moose <olymoose@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On 11/12/2014 9:53 PM, ChrisB wrote:
>> Perhaps, Moose, but that’s a mixing of tenses as well. If McLuhan said that,
>> he did so in the past; so that should read, “Didn’t McLuhan say that the
>> mangle was the message?”.
>
> No, it would read "Didn’t McLuhan say 'The mangle is the message?'”
>
> But only if he actually said that. What he did, quite famously, say was "The
> medium is the message."
>
> I'm not sure what the correct might be usage for a spoof of what someone
> said. I do know that the present tense of 'to be' is crucial to his meaning
> in this line. "Was" could refer only to a past case or situation, whereas his
> clear intent was to say that it is generally true, past, present and future.
>
> Pedant Is* Moose
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