Another Avern for you

Adam Stephanides · 01 Aug 2002, 02:08 · from urth-v0208.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: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) Another Avern for you
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2002 21:08:10 -0500
Message-ID: <urth-v0208-1507 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0208/1507.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

on 7/31/02 11:01 AM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes at ddanehy at siebel.com wrote:

> Actually, the text makes clear that they are from _north_ of
> the equator (or "waist of the Urth"), and that this is a false
> belief, a folk-etymology common among the people of the
> Commonwealth.

Well, it's not a "folk-etymology" in the sense of being an incorrect
etymology; it's a true etymology based upon a false belief (cf. Ash's
remarks in TCotA, chap. 16, pp. 121-2 of Timescape ed.).

> The real reason they are "shadowless" is not
> given ... but note the title of the first volume of tBotNS.

Ash goes on to say "In a fable made in the earliest morning of our race, a
man sold his shadow and found himself driven out everywhere he went.  No one
would believe that he was human."  Earlier, Ava told Severian that "Ascians
are not human." (TCotA, chap. 10, p. 72).

--Adam

--=20

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