(urth) This Week in Google Alerts: story with Gaiman

[Marc Aramini]

This perspicuous language they speak, where one meaning corresponds to one word (how could present be now and gift?), is the height of irony in regards to Severian and his tale, and this is something that always surprised me.  How any language could approach a one to one relationship between symbol and symbolized seemed an impossibility as fantastic as the alzabo, and Severian's entire tale seems to belie this clarity of meaning in language ("he was the smallest of those dead" for example, is completely ambiguous).  It's pretty clear when Johnson tried to compile his dictionary with the protestant ethos of scripture (the word of God was immutable law) that it was an impossible task, rife with interpretation.

I always saw this as a slightly theological analogy here, that one Word can have many interpretations or instantiations, in direct opposition to the idea that the Words themselves could be free from an interpretive task.