Severa

Gerry Quinn · 04 Dec 2011, 15:24 · from 2011-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: gerry at bindweed.com (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Sun, 4 Dec 2011 15:24:10 -0000
Subject: (urth) Severa
In-Reply-To: <4EDB8AC2.7060009 at verizon.net>
References: <SNT123-W6371207C738D03BA4E873CFB70 at phx.gbl><48D4A47469614AF39BFCA0FC6A3BC537@Rover><4EDAD016.7080805 at verizon.net><947D23D9-DEB0-4E98-9FD0-0577C2D53878 at gmail.com><498DC12CB4EC482AA7F7514AA8340B4E@Rover>
	<4EDB8AC2.7060009 at verizon.net>
Message-ID: <E27732ECBFEF4C96861721DFD6E87B69@Rover>



From: David Stockhoff 

On 12/4/2011 9:10 AM, Gerry Quinn wrote:

> > Certainly the book seems to be suggesting that a twin sister exists 
> > somewhere.
> > With regard to this question, it doesn?t really matter if the 
> > torturers pick names, or defer to the client?s wishes.
> > There is a possibility that occurs to me ? the torturers name the boy 
> > and the witches name the girl. Might the torturers have given a twin?s 
> > name to the boy, then handed over the girl to the witches, who gave 
> > her a standard name? It would explain Merryn?s name, but it seems a 
> > slightly convoluted explanation.

> That's what I said, except that Severian is not "a twin's name." It's 
> just a name. Any Latinate male named can be twinned with a female form.
But we do get a hint that it?s typical of a twin:
****************************************
"She was your sister, wasn't she?"

He nodded. "We were twins. Big Severian, did you ever have a sister?"

"I don't know. My family is all dead. They've been dead since I was a baby. 
****************************************

And probably not all Latinate names can be associated with saints of both genders.


> What's convoluted about it?

The explanation?  Just that the torturers take the trouble to select a twin?s name for the boy, but then say nothing to the witches.  [Assuming it?s a name indicative of a twin, obviously.  Perhaps there?s nothing there.]

- Gerry Quinn

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20111204/582e6ddb/attachment.htm>

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