hus (onomastics)

Michael Straight · 04 Dec 2000, 09:19 · from whorl-v0012.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: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Subject: Re: (whorl) hus (onomastics)
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2000 09:19:11
Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0041 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0012/0041.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

On Sat, 2 Dec 2000, Robert Borski wrote:

> "Hus is a little embarrassing. It's an old word for house. (A hussy was a
> kept woman: a house woman, like a house dog, rather than a housewife--a
> woman who was shacking up.) When I started the book, I wanted to combine =
the
> house-pet idea with the wild-boar idea, and called Babbi a hushhog. I had=
n't
> gotten very far before I realized that most readers would see the word as
> hush.og and my characters began referring to him as "hus." So I left it at
> that."

"hush.og"?  Looks like a website for librarians.  I suppose that's
supposed to say "hush og"?  And I guess you mean that the orignial word
was 'hushog' (one 'h' in the middle) pronounced "hus hog"?  Took me a
minute to figure that out - more confusing than the Matera Mint typo in
Exodus.

> Robert Borski (who still doesn't understand how a "a half-grown hus" can
> look like "a cluster of boys, or two men upon their hands and knees," but=
 I
> guess that's me.)

I think it's just trying to capture the oddity of eight legs.  Maybe our
perceptions are so used to two/four legs that seeing eight legs would
initially register as more than one critter. =20

-Rostrum

*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.
*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.moonmilk.com/whorl/
*To leave the list, send "unsubscribe" to whorl-request at lists.best.com
*If it's Wolfe but not Long Sun, please use the URTH list: urth at lists.best.=
com

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