A pincushion of etc’s

Start with what passes today as a cliche: “Policymakers also need to worry about those other factors—societal, political, economic, historical, cultural, geographical, governmental, psychological, technological, ethical, religious etc—that are so undeniably part of policy analysis and management.”

That pincushion of “etcetera’s” Indicates things are just critical enough to get a nod, but not that critical to actually name. So too Samuel Taylor Coleridge argued “matter” was treated like a pincushion whose surface was hidden by all the sensations, thoughts and properties stabbed into it.

You ask today’s version of, “What are the important factors?,” and you get a pincushion of responses affixed with all manner of “etc’s” “Hail, Muse! Et Cetera,” the poet, Byron, put it in the third canto of Don Juan.

And yet, writes Wittgenstein: “Again and again, my ‘etc’ has a limit.”