Digest urth.v002.n015

Alice Turner · 06 Jul 1997, 09:12 · from urth-v0002.mbox · original

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: "Alice Turner" <al at interport.net>
Subject: (urth) Re: Digest urth.v002.n015
Date: Sun, 6 Jul 1997 09:12:09
Message-ID: <urth-v0002-0138 at digest.urth.net>
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[Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other work=
s]

Two ways to go with "aris," neither perfect: there's the Greek "aristos,"
as in aristocrat, which means "the best." (Aristocracy is government by the
best.) Going that road would make Polyaris a sort of Holy Ghost stand-in,
which I think its a bit much (but maybe not, in this already too simplistic
story). Then there is "arris," of which the single r version is a variant;
it is the sharp edge formed by the contact of two plane or curved surfaces,
i.e. the edges of a prism. In that case, Polyaris is simply a witty name
for a glossy multicolored parrot. (Poly as in "wants a cracker.")

"Kul" in Greek is the Latin "cyl" as in cylinder, and it means (or derives
from) "to roll." I can't make much of that, myself.

It's hard for me to take this story seriously when I keep humming the title
to "California Dreamin'!"

-alga-

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