This Week in Google Alerts: story with Gaiman

David Stockhoff · 19 Feb 2011, 18:44 · from 2011-February.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: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2011 13:44:29 -0500
Subject: (urth) This Week in Google Alerts: story with Gaiman
In-Reply-To: <463075.91314.qm at web161801.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
References: <463075.91314.qm at web161801.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <4D600F8D.4000409 at verizon.net>

Definitely. At very least, it's a broad wink.

On 2/19/2011 12:11 PM, Marc Aramini wrote:
> This perspicuous language they speak, where one meaning corresponds to one word (how could present be now and gift?), is the height of irony in regards to Severian and his tale, and this is something that always surprised me.  How any language could approach a one to one relationship between symbol and symbolized seemed an impossibility as fantastic as the alzabo, and Severian's entire tale seems to belie this clarity of meaning in language ("he was the smallest of those dead" for example, is completely ambiguous).  It's pretty clear when Johnson tried to compile his dictionary with the protestant ethos of scripture (the word of God was immutable law) that it was an impossible task, rife with interpretation.
>
> I always saw this as a slightly theological analogy here, that one Word can have many interpretations or instantiations, in direct opposition to the idea that the Words themselves could be free from an interpretive task.
>


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