Subject: Re: (urth) Re: (whorl) New Wolfe story online (spoilers for

From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Date: Sun, 06 May 2001 21:43:15 +0000

On Sun, 6 May 2001, Endymion9 wrote:
> >"Nawt lak 'ou. Aw zay, 'ou vhill nawt neffer grawnt offer mee agan."
> >"Not like you. I say, you will not never[?] grunt[?] over me again."
> >
> >"Dhoss bhoyes, de vhun keels de odder. Aw douh nawthing."
> >"Those boys, the one kills the other. I do nothing."

Need I point out this last bit is probably a reference to Cain and Abel?

> Even if I missed a word here or there I could understand Jane Doe's intent.
> With Pig it was many times the other way around.  I could get 3 out of 10
> words and had no idea if he was talking friendly or threateningly to Horn.

I hate to say it, loving Wolfe as I do, but this whole dialect thing
strikes me as a cheap way of making banal stuff seem more profound.  It's
as if the satisfaction you get from working out what the heck people are
saying is supposed to make up for the fact that what they're saying isn't
all that interesting (a strategy swiped from Douglas Adams's Sirius
Cybernetics Corporation).

Put all of Pig's lines in plain English, and I suspect it would be
painfully obvious that, as someone else pointed out, there's not much more
to his character than fawning over Silk|Horn and crying about his eyes.

-Rostrum

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/