(urth) This week in Google alerts

Gerry Quinn gerry at bindweed.com
Sat Nov 5 07:30:49 PDT 2011



From: entonio at gmail.com 

> No dia 2011/11/05, às 02:16, "Gerry Quinn" <gerry at bindweed.com>  
> escreveu:

> > Silver is a semi-precious metal.  It alliterates with Silk, and in  
> > the same way as the other epithet ‘Silent Silk’.
> >
> > This works, and it’s clearly what Wolfe had in mind in this passage.

> So when your parents called you Gerry, it can't possibly have been  
> because they liked the sound AND the meaning AND it was the name of a  
> relative. Surely ONE of those reasons suffices so it's clearly the one  
> they had in mind. 
Sure, there were such reasons.  The explanation of Silent Silk and Silver Silk has multiple reasons too – alliteration as well as meaning in terms of the story about Silk as well as silver being precious, and I think something about how aspects of gods get named.
But this Silvanus/Silenus thing... is there any actual *reason* being proposed – or just another ‘link’ that doesn’t have to make any sense?  
I mean it can’t be that Silk is Dionysus, because then Wolfe would have called him something with a ‘Di-‘ sound, right?  So Silk must be a faun... two fauns, actually, one of whom had nothing in particular to do with Dionysus.  Why fauns?  Why not bunnies?  Bunnies aren’t cute like everyone supposes...
I can’t *prove* from the text that no such link was intended, just like I can’t prove from the text that Hyacinth didn’t have a dick (which candidly I think is actually *less* unlikely than a lot of the hypotheses that get thrown around here, and at least it makes her ‘swordsman’ line funny).  I reject such hypotheses because I know I generally only have to read the text to find better.  
How come nobody even mentioned the clearly stated explanation of Silent and Silver Silk before now?  Those who object to my claim that my methodology largely involves reading the text have some questions to answer.  How can one run with the faun theory and seemingly not even notice the other?
- Gerry Quinn
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