Father Inire: teratoid

Son of Witz · 15 Dec 2010, 18:15 · from 2010-December.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: Sonofwitz at butcherbaker.org (Son of Witz)
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2010 10:15:08 -0800
Subject: (urth) Father Inire: teratoid
In-Reply-To: <46378429D4804E0FB49B2EB4142F2F1A@jill>
References: <SNT123-w3006DC41ED9FF0D70D88E0CF130 at phx.gbl>
	<4D07822B.3020105 at verizon.net>
	<04E80E4D-7897-4164-B3BF-D48923E309A8 at butcherbaker.org>
	<46378429D4804E0FB49B2EB4142F2F1A@jill>
Message-ID: <1417CBEF-B6C6-420C-91CB-DE6FDF62D08B at butcherbaker.org>

On Dec 15, 2010, at 9:43 AM, "Gerry Quinn" <gerryq at indigo.ie> wrote:

> 
> From: "Son of Witz" <Sonofwitz at butcherbaker.org>
>> So, of course I'm trying to figure out what this teratoid symbol LOOKS like.
>> I see that it is mostly a medical term for monstrous abnormality and tumours and such., but I don't find associated symbols with an image search.
> 
> I envisage a sort of red octopussy symbol, with rotational symmetry.
> 
> Note that the symbol appears on each mirror also:
> 
> ----------------------
> I was delighted to hear his voice, and largely in the hope that he would speak again, I asked, "Where are we, then?"
> "On Urth," he answered, and strode across the room to the folded panels. Their backs were set with clustered diamonds, as I now saw, and enameled with such twisted signs as had been on the door.
> 
> -----------------------
> 
> It may just be alienese for 'quantum reflector' or whatever the proper term for the mirrors is.
> 
> That the sign seems teratoid to Severian may not reflect its true meaning, even if it is intended as a hint to the reader that monsters can lurk in mirrors.  Then again he associates the symbol with cacogens, whom he thinks of - at least at this time - as monsters.
> 
> An actual meaning of 'monsters' seems a bit unlikely, especially engraved on every panel.
> 
> - Gerry Quinn

Thanks for pointing out the second mention of the "twisted signs".  Every description of things in the book seem to be repeated, phrased slightly differently. Trying To hunt these down and compile them is tough.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20101215/f9d730ae/attachment.htm>

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