(urth) Rudesind / Inire / Lunar Picture

John Watkins john.watkins04 at gmail.com
Tue Jul 27 05:12:58 PDT 2010


Perhaps "your blue Urth," when spoken to Severian, is meant to imply, not
"your Urth, not mine, because I'm a cacogen," but "your Urth, not mine,
because you may be its epitome."

At any rate, I don't object to the possibility that Rudesind is a cacogen so
much as I object to his identification with Inire.

On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 7:18 AM, David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>wrote:

> Only that Wolfe is very careful with his idioms and his voices. Recall, for
> example, that the cacogens speak in blank verse.
>
> Gerry Quinn wrote:
>
>>
>> From: "Jeff Wilson" <jwilson at io.com>
>>
>>> Also, "your blue Urth" is ultimately the translator's choice of words,
>>>
>> not necessarily a literal translation of what Severian recorded. "Your
>> [item]" is part of an English idiom that is popular among craftsmen who
>> work on other people's property, perhaps like an engineer who has been
>> hired to improve an existing potato chip production line, and this has
>> become a marketing tool where "your" addresses the audience even if they
>> don't own the item yet, and even if the crafter is promoting a recipe or
>> abstract idea rather than a service.
>>
>>> Googling "your basic" yields 2 million + examples of this modest
>>>
>> variation, but the idiom is at least decades old; "Your Show of Shows"
>> debuted in 1950.
>>
>> This use of "your" is common in Ireland, and has almost certainly been so
>> for generations.. A very common version is "your man" meaning "that man", as
>> in "[Do you] see your man over there?".
>>
>> Other versions use "your" in place of "the", as in "Your frog, now, [ in
>> contrast to some previously mentioned creature] is a  more amphibious type
>> of fellow".
>>
>> Of course the idiom may not be as common everywhere; but for me Rudesind's
>> use of "your"
>> carries no special implications relating to ownership or origin, and such
>> implications never occurred to me before I saw them discussed on this list.
>>
>> - Gerry Quinn
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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