September 16, 2016
‘Precious Artifact’ is a short story by Philip K. Dick that I read recently in the collection The Golden Man (Methuen, 1981). I won’t get into the story here, or the book, except to lend context to a phrase he coined for it. But if you’re averse to mild spoilers, skip ahead a little.
The phrase is introduced when the protagonist, based on Mars, is preparing to return to Earth, or Terra as it’s called in the story:
Milt Biskle said, “I want you to do something for me. I feel too tired, too—” He gestured. “Or depressed, maybe. Anyhow I’d like you to make arrangements for my gear, including my wug-plant, to be put aboard a transport returning to Terra.”
Milt’s singling out the wug-plant is significant both narratively (for reasons I’ll ignore) and emotionally: he’s attached to it to the point of calling it a pet. Later, on ‘Terra’, he finds it has not prospered in the new climate (‘my wug-plant isn’t thriving’), and soon afterwards ‘he found his Martian wug-plant dead’.
But wug-plant is most significant linguistically. Those of you with a background or interest in linguistics will know why, but for the benefit of other readers I’ll explain briefly.
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art, books, grammar, humour, language, linguistics, morphology, personal, words | Tagged: art, books, children, drawing, grammar, humour, Jean Berko, Jean Berko Gleason, language, language acquisition, linguistics, morphology, personal, Philip K Dick, PKD, psycholinguistics, sci-fi, The Golden Man, words, wug, wug test, wug-plant, wugs |
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Posted by Stan Carey
July 16, 2015
Philip K. Dick’s pleasurably paranoid science-fiction novel Time Out of Joint (1959) has a passage that shows the ingenuity of children in using language to manipulate perceived reality (something Dick himself did with brio in his writing). Sammy, a boy working on a makeshift radio, needs to get its crude antenna somewhere high:
Returning to the house he climbed the stairs to the top floor. One window opened on to the flat part of the roof; he unlatched that window and in a moment he was scrambling out onto the roof.
From downstairs his mother called, ‘Sammy, you’re not going out on the roof, are you?’
‘No,’ he yelled back. I am out, he told himself, making in his mind a fine distinction.
I imagine most kids, once their command of language is sufficiently sophisticated, play similar semantic games for short-term gain or amusement. The same kind of hyper-literalness is the basis for a lot of childhood humour (e.g., ‘Do you have the time?’ ‘Yes.’). I like PKD’s understated use of it which puts us in Sammy’s head for a moment.
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books, language, semantics | Tagged: books, children, communication, humour, language, literality, Philip K Dick, PKD, pragmatics, reading, sci-fi, science fiction, semantics, Time Out of Joint |
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Posted by Stan Carey
July 20, 2010
There was a minor book avalanche here last weekend. I removed one from its tower, which toppled unstoppably against its neighbour, and so on, with results that need hardly be described at length. Luckily there were no casualties: no toes crushed or book spines broken, just a torn cover getting torn some more. I took the hint and arranged them more stably. (And yes, I need a new bookshelf, or a dozen.)
It prompted me to carry out a plan that had just taken seed. A little earlier I had come across Nina Katchadourian’s Sorted Books project and immediately wanted to try it. The tangling of titles, the possibilities of ‘found form’ and cut-up wordplay — as a game it was irresistible. I took photos of a few, and have written them as mini-poems for ease of reading and to see how they appear in verse:
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How it is
How it is, the way that I went
Into the wild ancient world
Where the wasteland ends.
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Moondust
Chew on this moondust –
Good enough to eat.
.
Click for more book spine mashups
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books, photography, poetry, stories, wordplay, words | Tagged: Adam Thorpe, Andrew Smith, Bernard Mac Laverty, Betty Radice, bookmash, books, Carl Jung, Carlos Castaneda, Charles Bukowski, Charles Wilson, David Kerekes, David Lodge, David Slater, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, Digby Anderson, E H Carr, Edna O'Brien, Eric Schlosser, Erskine Childers, experiments, F Scott Fitzgerald, Frank O'Connor, Graham Chapman, Herbert van Thal, Hugh Leonard, J. R. R. Tolkien, James Gleick, James Kelman, Janet Malcolm, Jody Scott, Jon Krakauer, Jorge Luis Borges, Ladislaus Boros, Marvin Harris, Maureen Tatlow, Michael Moore, Neil Postman, Nicola Barker, Peter Bagge, Peter Mullen, Philip K Dick, photography, Phyllis Chappell, poetry, Robert Lloyd Praeger, Roy Porter, Samuel Beckett, Theodore Roszak, Tom Phelan, Tony Flannery, Viktor Frankl, visual poetry, William Pfaff, wordplay, words, writing |
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Posted by Stan Carey