{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2773",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 2773,
    "subject": "Digest urth.v030.n164",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2001-08-08T09:47:21+00:00",
    "last": "2001-08-08T09:47:21+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0030-0621@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes",
        "address": "ddanehy at siebel.com"
      },
      "date": "2001-08-08T09:47:21+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) RE: Digest urth.v030.n164",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "To Alga: \n\nYou're doubtless right about everything you say. Pullman's use\nof the word _is_ correct. And as a sometimes-writer myself, I agree\nthat the unexpected use of a word can be extraordinarily effective.\n\nPullman _is_ an extraordinary writer. I will remind you that the \nfirst substantive thing I said about TGC is that it is \"a marvellous \n_novel_. The characters and action are just plain overwhelming.\" I \nstand by that, and TSK (approximately 2/3 through) continues at that \nlevel. The only reason I am going to wait to buy a paperback of TAS\nis so I can shelve them together; I shelve pb's and hc's somewhat\ndifferently.\n\nNone of which bears directly on what you were responding to. I was\nin turn reacting to Tony Ellis's original comment that a child \nreading this book would be interested to learn that the Christian\nchurches have repurposed a word meaning \"spirit\" to mean \"evil\nspirit,\" and what I claimed and claim is that few, if any, children\nwill learn that from TGC.\n\nI originally stated that I believed Pullman's choice of the word \nwas motivated by his anticlerical agenda. Indeed, I believe that \nmany of the weaknesses of TGC and TSK are due to his serving his\nagenda preferentially to serving the work. \n\nTheodore Sturgeon once remarked of an entirely different writer \nthat he had \"sold his birthright for a pot of message.\" While I\ndon't think Pullman has sold his birthright, I believe he has\nallowed something of a lien on it. TGC and TSK have, in my opinion, \ntoo damn much _power_ to squander it on didactics.\n\nIn other words: I am not condemning Pullman; I am praising him,\nalbeit with faint damns.\n\nTo John Bishop:\n\nThat your \"actual child (now 11),\" approximately at the same\nplace with Pullman, \"had no problem whatsoever with 'daemon',\"\nis a good sign for that child. That he \"figured out quickly \nthat it was unrelated to 'demon',\" is a bit more problematic,\nsince it _is_ in fact related (if only etymologically) to \n\"demon,\" and, as Alga points out, \"spirit\" is simply a legitimate,\nif somewhat-disused, meaning for the standard word.\n\nI believe that Pullman _wants_ your child to make that \nconnection, and chose the word (out of many possible alternatives)\nspecifically for its propensity to offend the less literate sort\nof Christian. The few quotes from Pullman I've seen on this list\ntend to reinforce this impression: he's a Christian-baiter, and\nnot a very subtle one."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "BTW, he far prefers Lemony Snicket's series to Pullman."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "I saw those for the first time this weekend while I was picking\nup my TSK. Should I bother?\n\n\nTo Tony Ellis: "
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "If the word 'daemon' is at some point \"revealed to mean something\nlike an externalized soul\", right at that point the child -knows-\nthat a word with Christian connotations of evil is being used to\nmean something as harmless as 'spirit'. If she's spared my lesson\nin political etymology, fine. She's still being given something to\nthink about, which was my original argument."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Well, no, it wasn't. You actually wrote, \n\tI would hope that a child reading Pullman's book might be \n\tvery interested to learn that a word used by Christianity \n\tto mean an incarnation of evil originally meant something \n\tas harmless as \"spirit\",  and might wonder what other little \n\tmisappropriations and mistakes may have taken place over \n\tthe years.\n\nWhile the sense of \"being given something to think about\" is \ncertainly in there, your original argument seems to have been, \nprecisely, that the child would receive and be \"interested\" in\nthe \"lesson in political etymology.\"\n\n\nTo Pippen:\n\nRegarding Hamilton's \"Night's Dawn\" trilogy (which, by the way,"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "I recommend highly), you wrote:\nThe storms that rage around the planet are called \"armada storms\"  \nOne Earth dweller gives the derivation as coming from chaos theory. \n\"If a butterfly flapping its wings in China can create a hurricane\noff Florida, what could an armada of butterflies accomplish?\"\n\nI did feel a twinge of recognition, though when I read that bit in\nHamilton.  Obviously, the man knows his Bradbury "
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Ummm... no, he knows his chaos theory, or at least the pop version\nof it. The \"butterfly in China\" is a standard rhetorical trope of\nchaos theory, and to the best of my knowledge is unrelated, except\nperhaps by accident, to the Bradbury yarn. The basic idea is that\nweather is a chaotic system, where small changes in initial conditions\n(where, again, \"initial conditions\" simply means \"the conditions at\nthe time the difference first appears, or when we first begin \nmonitoring\") can have arbitrarily large or small -- in short, \nunpredictable -- consequences. Thus, the small disturbance in the\nair caused by a butterfly's wings flapping in China may, through a\nseries of interactions with other air motions, be a contributing\ncause of a hurricane in Florida six months later; if that damn\nbutterfly had just sat still, there'd have been a snowstorm in \nAppalachia instead. \n\nOr not. The sensitivity of the weather \"system\" to something _this_\nsmall is highly questionable, but it stands as a dramatic, if\nnot melodramatic, example of \"sensitivity to initial conditions.\"\n\n\n--Dan'l"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}