Still More Infrequently Asked Questions

mark millman · 04 Jan 2000, 10:28 · 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: mark millman <millman at us.ncipher.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Still More Infrequently Asked Questions
Date: Tue, 04 Jan 2000 10:28:45
Message-ID: <urth-v0028-0671 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0028/0671.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

At 9:57 AM 31 December 1999, "Talarican"=20
<chemmie at mindspring.com> wrote:

> I:XV when Severian and Dr. Talos first meet=20
> in the inn, Talos remarks, upon learning Sev=20
> is a torturer, "You're a tall fellow - that's a=20
> shame - ...".  What did he mean by that? Is=20
> there some reason torturers should be short?
> (low ceilings in the oubliette? <g> Or per-
> haps Talos is already sizing Sev up as a possi-
> ble actor, as Talos is disposed to view every-
> one he meets in terms of their potential im-
> mediate usefulness to him and his master)

"Tall" can also mean proud, brave, or handsome,
as in "tall ships" and "tall in the saddle".  I suspect
that you're right, and Dr. Talos was assessing=20
Severian's usefulness as an actor, but not simply in=20
terms of his height.

Mark Millman

*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