teratoid symbols

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 25 Jul 2006, 17:14 · from 2006-July.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: danldo at gmail.com (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes)
Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2006 10:14:21 -0700
Subject: (urth) teratoid symbols
In-Reply-To: <BAY103-F16D62D553D2FA9CCFFD67FD75A0 at phx.gbl>
References: <BAY103-F16D62D553D2FA9CCFFD67FD75A0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <1f7617370607251014j34a88259k4d1b41dea2fefc8 at mail.gmail.com>

In medicine, "teratoid" means resembling a teras, or grotesquely deformed.
(A teras is a deformed embryo.)

An online version of Webster's defines "teratoid" as "resembling a monster."

In short, "teratoid symbols" would not at all resemble a  contemporary
radiation hazard warning sign, but would be either grossly deformed
or monstrous-looking symbols.

On 7/25/06, b sharp <bsharporflat at hotmail.com> wrote:
> In a recent criticism of my Urth before Earth ideas, one anonymous reviewer
> asserted that Earth must be in the past of Urth because of
>
> "the radiation hazard warning signs in the House Absolute, the radioactive
> isotopes in the mine at Saltus which have decayed to stable, non-radioactive
> heavy metals"
>
> Are these Lupinology world truisms or the foibles of this one person?
>
> Regarding radiation hazard warning signs, I have seen mention of them in the
> past but I didn't know it was accepted dogma as explanation for the teratoid
> symbols which seem to mark Father Inire's areas.  Worth addressing.
>
> I think the interpretation is a mistake, though understandable.  Radiation
> sources are often referred to as "teratogenic" but radiation is only one of
> a number of teratogens. The terato prefix means malformed.  And its roots
> are from Greek for monster (or portent).
>
> I suspect Wolfe intended that interpretation for Father Inire.
>
> -bsharp
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>


-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes, writer, trainer, bon vivant
-----
http://www.livejournal.com/users/sturgeonslawyer
"Shovels are essential to the fantasy genre.
However, they are primarily used by the authors rather than the
characters." -- Stephen R. Donaldson

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net