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arruginated
I came across this word in Ulysses and I'm totally stumped.
It's not in a single dictionary in my possession. The closest is "ruggedized" (American).
I have tried looking for roots or a cognate. The closest is "rug".
It conspicuous by its absence in the annotations in the Oxford World's Classic version (annotated by Jeri Johnson), otherwise comprehensive.
It is conspicuous by its absence in all of the guide books. I have three, one of which -- Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford -- is a tomb, an encyclopaedia, and besides, includes entries even when the source of an unusual word or term is unknown (e.g. Somethingorother : The source of this term is unknown).
Google returns 231 for arruginated, none of them definitions, all of them on e-texts of Ulysses.
Was it a typo? Perhaps it should read "originated" ? The 1922 text of Ulysses contains a number of typos, all of them mentioned in an appendix with correction. Arruginated is not mentioned in the appendix of ammendations. I have not found a version in which it does not read "arruginated". And on the Naxos unabridged audio-recording of Ulysses, Jim Norton, the narrator, reads it as "arruginated" (pronouncing it "or-RIG-i-nay-tid" with the RIG rhymes with "pig").
A search of a highly active Yahoo! re-through group --"Joyce-Ulysses · A look at James Joyce's Ulysses" -- with 616 members and 6 years of posts does not yield a single result.
If AWADtalk cannot help, I will have to consign it to the unknown as a mystery all indissoluble. But then, why should there be no mention of it anywhere?
Episode : Ithaca.
Context : Mr Bloom is unlocking the garden gate to let Stephen Dedalus out :
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By inserting the barrel of an arruginated male key in the hole of an unstable female lock, obtaining a purchase on the bow of the key and turning its wards from right to left, withdrawing a bolt from its staple, pulling inward spasmodically an obsolescent unhinged door and revealing an aperture for free egress and free ingress.
yow. that's a tough one. no luck for me.
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arruginated
Was it a typo? Perhaps it should read "originated" ? The 1922 text of Ulysses contains a number of typos, all of them mentioned in an appendix with correction.
{Shakes head in disbelief}
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Was it a typo? Perhaps it should read "originated" ? The 1922 text of Ulysses contains a number of typos, all of them mentioned in an appendix with correction.
--Homo Loquens.
{Shakes head in disbelief}
-- Flange
I'm not sure what the source of this disbelief is; whether it is disbelief at the fact that the first edition of Ulysses contained a number of typos or whether it is disbelief that my sentence about typos is itself a kind of typo.
That Ulysses contains a number of typos, at least, should not surprise you.
* Second only to Finnegans Wake, it is the most difficult novel in any language.
* Joyce's hand writing was notoriously spidery
* The typesetters were French with a limited grasp of English (The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice took the first publishers of Ulysses to court on charges of publishing "obscenity" on 14 February, 1921 and won. Thereafter, all publication in the English-speaking world stopped. A ban on publication of Ulysses was not lifted until the landmark decision of the Hon. John M. Woolsey of the US District Court in 1933).
Clearly, you are unaware that there is considerable controversy regarding the authentication of the most significant artefact of literary modernism : Ulysses.
The first edition -- Shakespeare and Company, Paris, 1922 -- was riddled with typos for reasons mentioned above, and Joyce died before an authorised emendation had been made.
Later "corrected" versions tended to be as controversial to Ulysses's champions as the original had been to its detractors since they largely depended on one's choice of copy-text and approach to conflating the various galley-proofs and manuscripts in circulation.
The most recent solution is to use the 1922 text with a list of emendations, an errata -- sometimes supplying more than one erratum in each instance -- all carefully numbered by line and paginated.
The Oxford World's Classics edition of Ulysses ("This is the one to buy" --Times Literary Supplement) for example, is kind of like Ulysses in situ: literally a facsimile of the original 1922, with offset words, ink blotches, upside-down letters, and so on, all left unaltered: "Joyces 'misses in prints' [1] are now yours" (Jeri Johnson, Introduction to Ulysses).
In reply to your reply, Flange, let me repeat:
Ulysses contains a number of typos, all of them mentioned in the errata to modern facsimiles of the 1922 Shakespeare and Company text.
This word "arruginated" is not mentioned anywhere; neither in the gloss, nor in the errata.
As it happens, I have since received a reply from a Joyce reader providing a definition for this obscure-as-hell word if anyone is interested (although it would appear at this point that anyone [sic] is not) :
arruginated on the pattern of rugine + ar- prefix variant spelling of ad- assimilated before r (as in arrive, arrogate).
rugine
v. t. [F. ruginer to scrape.] To scrape or rasp, as a bone;
to scale. [R.] --Wiseman.
n. [F.] (Surg.) An instrument for scraping the periosteum from bones; a raspatory.
as a back-reference to earlier mention of the key :
The key scraped round harshly twice and, when the heavy door had been
set ajar, welcome light and bright air entered.
Telemachus, Ulysses
Oh, and just in passing, Flange (turning to Flange) isn't it time you grew out of the (arms akimbo, rolling eyes) oh-so-childish device of referring to yourself on message forums in (sneering sardonically) the third person?
[1] Finnegans Wake.
Edit : Removed snipe.
huh. rugine. wouldn't thought to look for that. perhaps one of our doctor types would have picked up on it.
I find it curious that editions give errata, rather than just fixing them in place, but I understand the whole "historical" thang, too.
There is a rarish word arrugia in Lewis & Short that is glossed as 'a shaft and pit in a gold mine'; it's a hapax in Pliny. It is suggested that the word may be related to runco 'to weed', runcina, Greek orusso 'to dig', oruxo 'to dig'.
[Addendum / edit: added gloss for runco.]
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I find it curious that editions give errata, rather than just fixing them in place, but I understand the whole "historical" thang, too.
The errata? Yeah. It's basically because in most cases there is confusion as to which was the final proof and which emendation of several different emendations on several different manuscripts Joyce would have approved of and so on.
One guy (German textual critic and English professor Walter Gabler, 1984) even published a version with two versions! The verso or left-hand pages of his Beijing-telephone-directory-sized tomb for a 'synoptic text' (a critically edited version in "compositional development" displayed by a system of diacritics) and the retro or right-hand pages displaying the "continuous reading text" resulting from an extrapolation without diacritics of the edition text.
Trust me, get the version with the errata.
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Edit : I'm sorry, but I have decided you are the kind of message-forum-poster who turns his nose up at, and makes evasive slights about, things he doesn't know anything about. It has demoted you significantly in my esteem. But thanks for the chuckle.
much better done in a PM. 
--and incorrect, at that.
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much better done in a PM
Fixed (excepting that, rather ironically, it lives on in your reproof).
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irony intended.
This reminds me of something. Ah yes :
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sorry. I got no life
-etaoin
Clearly.
If you're not happy here, HL, please find yourself another board, up to your, ahem, standards. Ad hominem is truly a weapon of the weak.
Hey, guys.
Emough, please. This started out as a pretty interesting thread and it's just about terminally ill from sniping. I don't even like James Joyce, and I found the serious side of this thread very interesting.
It was not enough to induce me to ever crack the covers of a James Joyce work again, certainly, but fascinating from a word sense.
We CAN all get along without rudeness and condescension.
We CAN all get along without rudeness and condescension.
This laudable notion seems increasingly inapparent.
I had to look this one up, and thought some of you may be interested in the usage note:
ad hom·i·nem (hŏm'ə-nĕm', -nəm)
adj.
Appealing to personal considerations rather than to logic or reason: Debaters should avoid ad hominem arguments that question their opponents' motives.
[Latin : ad, to + hominem, accusative of homō, man.]
ad hom'i·nem' adv.
USAGE NOTE As the principal meaning of the preposition ad suggests, the homo of ad hominem was originally the person to whom an argument was addressed, not its subject. The phrase denoted an argument designed to appeal to the listener's emotions rather than to reason, as in the sentence The Republicans' evocation of pity for the small farmer struggling to maintain his property is a purely ad hominem argument for reducing inheritance taxes. This usage appears to be waning; only 37 percent of the Usage Panel finds this sentence acceptable. The phrase now chiefly describes an argument based on the failings of an adversary rather than on the merits of the case: Ad hominem attacks on one's opponent are a tried-and-true strategy for people who have a case that is weak. Ninety percent of the Panel finds this sentence acceptable. The expression now also has a looser use in referring to any personal attack, whether or not it is part of an argument, as in It isn't in the best interests of the nation for the press to attack him in this personal, ad hominem way. This use is acceptable to 65 percent of the Panel.•Ad hominem has also recently acquired a use as a noun denoting personal attacks, as in “Notwithstanding all the ad hominem, Gingrich insists that he and Panetta can work together” (Washington Post). This usage may raise some eyebrows, though it appears to be gaining ground in journalistic style.•A modern coinage patterned on ad hominem is ad feminam, as in “Its treatment of Nabokov and its ad feminam attack on his wife Vera often border on character assassination” (Simon Karlinsky). Though some would argue that this neologism is unnecessary because the Latin word homo refers to humans generically, rather than to the male sex, in some contexts ad feminam has a more specific meaning than ad hominem, being used to describe attacks on women as women or because they are women, as in “Their recourse … to ad feminam attacks evidences the chilly climate for women's leadership on campus” (Donna M. Riley).
From Gurunet. [/showing my ignorance yet again]
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Google returns 231 for arruginated, none of them definitions, all of them on e-texts of Ulysses.
well, it's not just a hapax in Ulysses anymore (oh accursed internet!):
Lovely word, discomfiture. Creates the very opposite of what it describes: a feeling of ease. Its mere appearance elevates the tone -- and god knows the tone here and there could stand some elevating.
Beautiful in itself, and also for what it so easily summons, such as "deconfiture" which, deprived of its privative, gives us "confiture," as in "confiture de fraises de bois" which might then lead us quickly from the banks of the Seine, by a commodius vicus, to the riverrun of the Liffey, where in a back room of a pub two doors down from the hazard that is just across from 7 Eccles Street, and where recently the postman found an arruginated key that looked as if it had been lying on the grass without complaint for 89 years, a jam session is in progress, and there are flourishes and licks of Jelly Roll Morton, and...
I found that one, too, t, and it made very little sense as a comment to the blog it was sent?
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I'm not sure what the source of this disbelief is;
The disbelief is rooted in the notion that you would spend a lot of time trying to find meaning in Joyce, or at least trying to find meaning in it through intellectual means. That there would be a lot of typos in Ulysses I find not at all hard to believe. To borrow a phrase from the late, great Walt Kelly, Joyce ran with the language and in doing so left much that would be hard to corroborate from standard sources. My advice for reading Joyce is just to go with the flow. Surrender to the music. Don't try to analyze it intellectually.
That said, I might suggest that arruginate is not a typo but a dialectical represention of originate. Try it with the context.
Arruginate is to add arugula (English), roquette (French), rucola or rughetta (Italian) to the other leafy vegetables in the salad.
Help! I'm slowly become TEd!
or to make the sound of a Model A:
Arrooga!
there, I just arruginated.
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Help! I'm slowly become TEd!
I'd love to help rescue you, padre, but I'm afraid that I might catch that nasty prescriptivitis of yours. Sorry!
>That said, I might suggest that arruginate is not a typo but a dialectical represention of originate. Try it with the context.
yeahbut, that said, 'originated' makes very little sense in context -- to wit, putting an originated male key in an unstable female lock. (he's just prolixizing the opening of a gate here, folks.)
A couple of thoughts, the first of which was that he meant a toothed key. I looked up the word rasp, and the following could be interpreted to give some credence to this idea:
Part of Speech noun
Definition 1. a coarse file with conical teeth.
Similar Words file [2]
Definition 2. the act of rasping, esp. the act of scraping wood with a coarse file.
Synonyms scrape (1) , filing {file [2] (vt) }
Crossref. Syn. scratch , scrape
Similar Words excoriation {excoriate} , abrasion , gnash , scratch , grind
Definition 3. a rough, grating sound.
Synonyms scrape (1) , grating {grate [2] (vi 1)} , scratch (3)
Crossref. Syn. scratch , scrape , grind
Similar Words screech , creak , squawk , stridulation {stridulate} , squeak , croak , grind
Related Words gnash , creak , abrasive wordsmyth My other thought was that if arruginated means raspy, maybe it could have been intended as a kind of synonym for rusty; that is, it would seem to make sense that if a key is rusty, it will make a rasping sound in the lock. [shrug]
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>Try it with the context.
yeahbut, that said, 'originated' makes very little sense in context -- to wit, putting an originated male key in an unstable female lock. (he's just prolixizing the opening of a gate here, folks.)
Well, there you go. Maybe he just liked the sound of it.
--prolixizing--
Yes. And going beyond detail to redundancy, as in D. Thomas's "avuncular uncle."
And, as says faldo, he probably liked the sound.
Joy in excess.
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(he's just prolixizing the opening of a gate here, folks.)
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--prolixizing--
Yes. And going beyond detail to redundancy, as in D. Thomas's "avuncular uncle."
And, as says faldo, he probably liked the sound.
Prolixizing: Absolutely.
Things you need to know about Ulysses to make sense of arruginated :
Ulysses takes place in a single day, 16 June 1904 (Bloomsday).
The main characters-- Leopold and Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus-- correspond to Homer's Odysseus (Ulysses), Penelope, and Telemachus.
Each of the 18 chapters corresponds to one of Odysseus's (or Telemachus's) adventures and each chapter is written in a different style, with symbolism appropriate to the corresponding adventure. These patterns were hinted by Joyce in privately-circulated schemata.
Therefore, the symbolic method of Ithaca (the episode whence arruginated originated) needs to be understood for the use of arruginated to be understood.
Jeri Johnson explains why arruginated is the mote juste for Ithaca:
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In a language which is at once impersonal, nominative, 'arid' and self-generating, the text [of Ithaca] propels itself forward, apparently driven by an accelerating impulse to name and describe with increasingly irrelevant phenomenon.
So, Bloom unlocks and opens the door "By inserting the barrel of an arruginated male key in the hole of an unstable female lock, obtaining a purchase on the bow of the key and turning its wards from right to left, withdrawing a bolt from its staple, pulling inward spasmodically an obsolescent unhinged door and revealing an aperture for free egress and free ingress."
Action so precisely delineated, broken down into such minute constituent movements, applied to such exactly named physical phenomena, virtually ceases to be action. Narrative nearly disappears beneath the weight of such nominative proliferation. Not to mention the actual triviality of the action itself. Other narratives would more usually content themselves with statements in the order of "Bloom unlocked the door to let Stephen out.'
No action beyond the stochastic can be detected behind the selection of facts to be related. The text appears both voracious and distracted; hungry to name everything, so frantic to do so that it turns its attention now here, now there, with no apparent rhyme or reason. [...]
Such a drive to name, to propogate facts, corresponds, at least superficially, to the hard rocks, the solidity and permanence of Ithaca. The compulsive urge to know the 'whats' in precise, unmistakable detail correlates with the anxiety of Odysseus in his initial failure to recognize his homeland.
Joyce confirms this interpretation :
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"[Ulysses] is the epic of two races (Israel-Ireland) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life)…. It is also a kind of encyclopaedia. My intention is not only to render the myth [of Ulysses] sub specie temporis nostri [in the mode of our time] but also to allow each adventure (that is, every hour, every organ, every art being interconnected and interrelated in the somatic scheme of the whole) to condition and even to create its own technique. Each adventure is so to speak one person -- as Aquinas relates of the heavenly hosts."
Hugh Kenner coined this technique the “Uncle Charles Principle” :
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Kenner observes that Joyce uses language that is relevant to the characters. This tailoring of language to the individual in the text gives an added flair of characterization. Not only are individuals described, but the text itself reveals subtler aspects of their character, allowing the reader to glean even more out of the writing. [...]
Perhaps the most precise example of the “Uncle Charles Principle” is seen with Uncle Charles himself [a character from an earlier novel by Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man].
Cliché and moderately base diction is used when describing Stephen’s pedestrian uncle. Charles is an avid smoker and is said to have “…smoked such black twist that as last his nephew suggested to him to enjoy his morning smoke in a little outhouse…” (Joyce 50). Uncle Charles is then said to “repair” to the outhouse. Joyce was heavily criticized for this trope. Windham Lewis even used this incident to prove that Joyce used a “slop shed” style and wasn’t worthy of serious literature.
It later became apparent that this was a conscious choice as Uncle Charles himself was given to hackneyed or affected speech. Jeri Johnson writes, “He ‘repairs to the outhouse’ because ‘repairing to outhouses’ is what characters like Uncle Charles do”
The same goes for arruginated in the Mythic method of Ulysses.
The Mythic method, by the way, is the superimposition of fin-de-siècle Dublin on ancient Greece--and of Mr Bloom on Odysseus; Stephen Dedalus on Telemachus; Molly on Penelope; the Citizen on Polyphemeus and so on--where thematic correspondences are brought into relief and should be interpreted as archetypes of the human struggle :
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As Homer sent his Ulysses wandering through the inferno of Greek mythology and Virgil his Aeneas through one of Roman mythology so Dante himself voyaged through the inferno of the mediaeval Christian imagination and so Mr. Joyce sent his hero through the inferno of modern subjectivity.
—Thomas McGreevy.
Sheesh--WAY too bogged down in minutiae for me! Both Joyce and the folks you quoted, HL. However, I did enjoy your "mote juste".
Since it has to do with a key, why not call a locksmith ? Preferably an older locksmith with an interest in the history of the locksmithing craft.
Or is that too obvious?
> too obvious?
With Joyce ~ afraid so, wow! It's English, Jim, but not as we know it.
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Sheesh--WAY too bogged down in minutiae for me! Both Joyce and the folks you quoted, HL. However, I did enjoy your "mote juste".
mot schmo.
P.S.
Homeric parallels in Ulysses are not "minutiae".
I have no literary support for this, but I believe I can offer insight into what arruginated means. The word "ruga" or its more common plural form "rugae" means in medicine "an anatomical fold or wrinkle especially of the viscera." The lining of the stomach is full of little ridges called rugae.
http://arbl.cvmbs.colostate.edu/hbooks/pathphys/digestion/stomach/anatomy.html The word's relation to the more commonly-encountered "corrugated" should be obvious to this community. I believe that Joyce was describing the appearance of an old-fashioned key, which would have had teeth that were cut in a series of ridges or rugae, with "arruginated" being to rugae as "irradiated" is to radiation.
http://thehouseofabalone.com/skeletonkeys.html http://www.answers.com/topic/key http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup/objects/314821_skeleton_key.php?id=314821
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The word "ruga" or its more common plural form "rugae" means in medicine "an anatomical fold or wrinkle especially of the viscera." The lining of the stomach is full of little ridges called rugae. I believe that Joyce was describing the appearance of an old-fashioned key, which would have had teeth that were cut in a series of ridges or rugae, with "arruginated" being to rugae as "irradiated" is to radiation.
Very interesting. You've thrown a whole new light on the offending word.
A certain Joyce on-line read-through community I sought for help had settled on a glorified "scraped"
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rugine
\Ru"gine\, v. t. [F. ruginer to scrape.] To scrape or rasp, as a bone;
to scale. [R.] --Wiseman.
rugine
\Ru"gine\, n. [F.] (Surg.) An instrument for scraping the periosteum
from bones; a raspatory.
But I think a key with "rugae" would make more sense here.
And trying to make Joyce make sense serves us
how, exactly?
I am reminded of a tale Isaac Asimov told of the time he was sitting in on a college English class on science fiction. The professor spent a long time lecturing on the meaning of a certain Asimov story. Asimov came up to him after the class, introduced himself, and said that he never meant any of that. The professor went through the obligatory thank-yous for coming to the class and how much he admired Dr. Asimov and then said, "But just because you wrote the story, what makes you think you have any idea what it's about?"
I was never sure whether Asimov was telling the story on the professor or on himself.
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And trying to make Joyce make sense serves us how, exactly?
No comment.
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I am reminded of a tale Isaac Asimov told of the time he was sitting in on a college English class on science fiction. The professor spent a long time lecturing on the meaning of a certain Asimov story. Asimov came up to him after the class, introduced himself, and said that he never meant any of that. The professor went through the obligatory thank-yous for coming to the class and how much he admired Dr. Asimov and then said, "But just because you wrote the story, what makes you think you have any idea what it's about?"
I was never sure whether Asimov was telling the story on the professor or on himself.
James Joyce: "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality."
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And trying to make Joyce make sense serves us how, exactly?
No comment.
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I am reminded of a tale Isaac Asimov told of the time he was sitting in on a college English class on science fiction. The professor spent a long time lecturing on the meaning of a certain Asimov story. Asimov came up to him after the class, introduced himself, and said that he never meant any of that. The professor went through the obligatory thank-yous for coming to the class and how much he admired Dr. Asimov and then said, "But just because you wrote the story, what makes you think you have any idea what it's about?"
I was never sure whether Asimov was telling the story on the professor or on himself.
James Joyce: "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality."
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And trying to make Joyce make sense serves us how, exactly?
Trying to run downt Joyce is so very silly. He is one of the most important writers of the modernist movement. Even the dictionary will tell you that. And unlike the hack blurb-authors of dust-jacket hyperbole, lexicographers don't throw superlatives at writers willy-nilly.
At the risk of offending some of you, I have to say that you are only making yourselves look stupid.
Now who was it said "it is better to be silent and thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt" ?
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"it is better to be silent and thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt"
Some of us, on the other hand, proclaim it.
HL:
You would do well to examine the semantic differences between ignorant and stupid. Just as you would be well advised to decrement the use of pejoratives as close as you can get to zero.
There are many who hold the opinion that the vast majority of James Joyce's writings are the babbling of a drunken lunatic. Just as there are those who believe that Shakespeare is vastly over-rated (Hi, Jackie).
But NONE OF US on this board are stupid. You do not insult me by calling me ignorant; but at your own peril do you throw about the s-word.
And I don't give a fig for what the dictionaries or anyone else say about Joyce (or Hemingway for that matter.) I will soon be 60 years of age and I refuse to waste any part of my (hopefully many) remaining years by reading or trying to read utter tripe disguised as literature on the one hand or newspaper-style writing crudely fopisted offr upon the reading public as literature on the other.
Instead give me writers whose words inform, inspire, educate, exalt, entertain, and elevate. People like the Durants, Faulkner, Wolfe, Poe, Foote, Tuchman (whom I know some people here despise (too bad)), even Dickens. And I don't like Dickens but I'd rather read him than Joyce.
And don't ever imply that I am stupid again.
> only making yourselves look stupid
If that's truly your opinion I would gently suggest you fuck off and bore someone else.
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HL:
There are many who hold the opinion that the vast majority of James Joyce's writings are the babbling of a drunken lunatic. [...] Instead give me writers whose words inform, inspire, educate, exalt, entertain, and elevate. People like the Durants, Faulkner [...]
And don't ever imply that I am stupid again.
--------------------
TEd
Have you read The Sound and the Fury? It has a number of stylistic similarities to Ulysses
And I didn't say you were stupid. I said by maintaining that James Joyce is not worth trying to understand some of you are making yourselves look ("have the appearance or give the impression of being, e.g. 'his home looked like a prison'") stupid; and not in the clinical, technical sense of the word, either, but in the pedestrian sense.
But perhaps I was thinking of Pound.
Unite and give praise to Ulysses. Those who will not must content themselves with a place in the lower intellectual orders.
--Ezra Pound.
and Coleridge,
Until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Actually, after your suggestion that I look up the meaning of the word stupid, I discover (here I am unflappably bringing this back to a discussion about words) that the etymology makes the word more apt than I first thought :
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ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: from French stupide or Latin stupidus, from stupere ‘be amazed or stunned.’
This was as great a surprise to me as was discovering that "read" -- etymologically speaking -- means "to interpret dreams".
Amazed or stunned. Exactly how I felt when I purchased a copy of Ulysses at the age of 16. I opened it at random, read half a page, and put it on the shelf where it remained untouched for 4 years.
Enjoying Ulysses, in my opinion, takes several years and several reads. It is kind of like the slow exposure of a photograph: with each new read, more details come into focus.
I feel strongly that Ulysses is the most important artefact of literary modernism (not simply because this is an academic consensus, but because this is also my own view after I read it). You feel strongly that this is not true. That's all.
Being challenged makes us come to the defence of and assert our opinions and beliefs; and this defines our axiological boundaries. A good thing, so long as it remains civilized.
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If that's truly your opinion I would gently suggest you f**k off and bore someone else.
No comment.
Damn.
I had something to say about "Ulysses" but then I had to run over to Georgia and buy some Alabama bourbon and when I got back everybody here was mad so instead of joining the fray I just went on to bed.
But this is what I was gonna say about "arruginated":
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The term "rugose" had much wider circulation back during James Joyce's days than it does today. Back in the early 20th Century most everyone who could read was aware of the paleozoic solitary rugosian horn coral tetracorala because of it's resemblence to the cornucopia; the Horn 0' Plenty. But not unlike life, the solitary coral o'plenty could offer but little bounty because it was too small; about the size of a rugose, indirect, human penis.
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Why, the pugnacious might ask, did you want to say that? Well I said it because I hope the wording I chose will give example to what I have to say about the writting of James Joyce, which is...
James Joyce knew or did not know what Isimov's professor knew by instinct i.e. what the writer writes is never what the reader reads. Maybe among those posting here only Faldage is old enough to remember 'Ned" in the first reader, but a hundred years ago ten million kids struggled to understand poor Ned and as a result Ned was understood by ten million different kids exactly ten million different ways. Such is the nature of language and human advance.
No. I'm not saying that useful information about the world around us can't be commuted by language. That would be silly. What I am saying is that each individual extracts information about the world that he deems pertinent to his survival (and by extention, his Culture) and as a reward for this learning he receives endorphins in the form of an "Ah Ha!. Now back to James Joyce.
One thing is for sure: for the common reader James Joyce did not his last four books write. For the working men of this World the time spent deciphering Joyce would be better spent baling hay or picking cotton, so it follows that sane or insane James Joyce wrote his final sequence of convoluted books for Asinov's professor friend and homo loquens and art critics everywhere who after spending hours upon hours chasing down presumed James Joyce's associations can find within their clever minds associations that evoke an "Ah Ha!".
There is nothing wrong with the idle mind being entertained.
Now is there?
My two cents about the word (I'm choosing to partially ignore what is not wordy about the thread):
In Spanish we've got the word "arruga" (wrinkle), directly from Lat. "ruga". Then come "arrugado" for "wrinkled", and "rugoso", for "coarse" (texture). I'm not sure anyone here has mentioned "corrugated" yet? That's certainly "wrinkled", or better yet, "ridgey", which I can envision also as a quality of the key.
Re: Joyce's
Ulysses, I love the bits that I understand, and I skip those I don't. Is this perverse? I dare say, but it's the only way I've found to enjoy it. As far as I'm concerned, that's the whole function of literature.
Do lighten up, everybody. Things are hard enough as it is for so many people all over the world.
