Wolfe's brilliance or my denseness?

Lee Berman · 23 May 2011, 16:36 · from 2011-May.txt.gz

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From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 12:36:17 -0400
Subject: (urth) Wolfe's brilliance or my denseness?
Message-ID: <SNT123-W8D72F102ECF2D22691F6BCF720 at phx.gbl>

>Jason H.: Wolfe is smart and clever, but I don't think the way he shows his 
> cleverness is by leaving elaborate clues at that level of 
> misdirection. At the level of tower-as-rocket, yes. But more elaborate 
> and obscured than that, I've never seen evidence for.

>James Wynn:..rather than a response, I recommend to you this essay as a starting place:
>http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10536

A good response I think, James. Andre-Driussi is certainly a Wolfe authority as much as
anyone can be. There may be some who will dispute his solutions for the highly 
veiled mysteries of Severian's dual-track identity as Apu Punchau or the sail-scrap 
origin of Hethor's mirrors. But it is nearly impossible to dispute that Wolfe's original
4-book BotNS had only the barest evidence for a Flood, while the added final book makes that 
conclusion incontrovertible.

>Bart Everson: It's been so long since I first read these I can't say whether I got
>it or not first time through.

Count me among those who did not get it the first time. Apologies for any presumption but
I think that all those who say they did get it the first time are non-native American English 
speakers.

Part of the disguise of Dorcas is the American English pronunciation which is Dor'-kis. The
stress on the first syllable and the vowel distortion in the second makes us rather unlikely
to connect the name Cas to Dorcas. I think non-native speakers are more likely to pronounce
the "a" in Dorcas as an "a" sound than native speakers. (shows we are speaking, not just 
reading these names in our heads).

Also, perhaps based on the tendency for English speakers to stress the first syllable, we tend
to draw nicknames from the first syllable of two-syllable names. Thomas becomes Tom, not "Mas".
Kathryn becomes Kathy, not "Thryn". I do know an Andrew who is nicknamed "Drew" but "Andy" is 
more common.

I daresay Mas would be as equal a disguise for a character named Thomas as Cas is for Dorcas.

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