Of Cacogens and Carnifexes (Carnifices?)

Jim Henley · 11 Nov 1999, 23:04 · from urth-v0028.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: "Jim Henley" <jlhenley at erols.com>
Subject: (urth) Of Cacogens and Carnifexes (Carnifices?)
Date: Thu, 11 Nov 1999 23:04:49
Message-ID: <urth-v0028-0457 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0028/0457.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Joy at last came to Casa High Clearing yesterday in the form of my belated
birthday copy of the Lexicon. Suffice to say I'm enjoying it hugely, but a
couple of etymologies are not in there that I wanted to offer up.

First "cacogen." Okay, filthy born. Right. Got that. But has anyone
suggested "shit-spewer" or even bullshitter? If we read it as being of the
same form as _pathogen_ we get "causer or creator or producer of ordure" -
cacogenesis would be the process itself. (And what a lovely process it is!)
=46rom there it's just a quick jaunt to the demotic, fueled by the resentment
for extrasolarians. And what do people resent? That the cacogens keep
whispering in the Autarch's ear, no doubt feeding him a line of crap to get
him to do what they want.

Seems like "cacogen" becomes a genuinely insulting thing to say about
someone.

Carnifex - wouldn't this simply be "meat maker?" A pretty direct
characterization of an executioner's function - you could see it maybe
appearing on their vision statements. Then if there were an unheated prison
where, one winter, an inmate was pressed into the role of acting headsman
in the absence of an official functionary, the poor fellow would be a
chilly con carnifex.

<runs like hell>

Best,

Jim
 ******************************************
"What fades in time                           Costello/
will hurt much more"                        Bacharach, "My Thief"

*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