What's in a name?

Dan Parmenter · 25 Feb 1999, 14:23 · from urth-v0024.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: Dan Parmenter <dan at lec.com>
Subject: (urth) What's in a name?
Date: Thu, 25 Feb 1999 14:23:21
Message-ID: <urth-v0024-0012 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0024/0012.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

From: "Kevin J. Maroney" <kmaroney at crossover.com>

> (Remember that most/all of the animal species of Urth except humans were
> driven extinct at some point in the past, and the animals present in the
> Book are alien replacements which approximate the original species.
> Destriers aren't horses, they're alien horse-like beings. This is an
> inversion of the standard sf cliche where an alien world is populated by
> exotic creatures which are actually just cows and bunnies with different
> names; here the Earth is populated by alien species which are *like* cows
> and bunnies.)

By the first rule of Wolfean naming ("everything is exactly what it
says it is") is it fair then to assume that Triskele is indeed a dog?
Possibly a "modified" dog, but a dog no less?  The Wolfean Naming Rule
clearly doesn't always work, since the Salamander is no newt (though
it does resemble a certain Newt after a fashion, it flames and flames
until its flames burn its bridges and it conveniently disappears :-)

Dan P. aka
Lexicographer Shellac

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

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