Rudesind / Inire / Lunar Picture

Gerry Quinn · 27 Jul 2010, 09:01 · from 2010-July.txt.gz

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From: gerryq at indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2010 10:01:00 +0100
Subject: (urth) Rudesind / Inire / Lunar Picture
References: <BLU142-W26A682C8D609BCBA950233C9A60 at phx.gbl>
	<4C4E1029.5020809 at io.com>
Message-ID: <730AE2C19DF54346BB7492D935335293@jill>

From: "Jeff Wilson" <jwilson at io.com>
> Also, "your blue Urth" is ultimately the translator's choice of words,
not necessarily a literal translation of what Severian recorded. "Your
[item]" is part of an English idiom that is popular among craftsmen who
work on other people's property, perhaps like an engineer who has been
hired to improve an existing potato chip production line, and this has
become a marketing tool where "your" addresses the audience even if they
don't own the item yet, and even if the crafter is promoting a recipe or
abstract idea rather than a service.
>Googling "your basic" yields 2 million + examples of this modest
variation, but the idiom is at least decades old; "Your Show of Shows"
debuted in 1950.

This use of "your" is common in Ireland, and has almost certainly been so 
for generations.. A very common version is "your man" meaning "that man", as 
in "[Do you] see your man over there?".

Other versions use "your" in place of "the", as in "Your frog, now, [ in 
contrast to some previously mentioned creature] is a  more amphibious type 
of fellow".

Of course the idiom may not be as common everywhere; but for me Rudesind's 
use of "your"
carries no special implications relating to ownership or origin, and such 
implications never occurred to me before I saw them discussed on this list.

- Gerry Quinn

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