(urth) Short Story 44: Continuing Westward

[Jeff Wilson]

On 8/31/2012 2:53 PM, Jerry Friedman wrote:
>> From: Marc Aramini <marcaramini at yahoo.com>
>> Continuing Westward

>> though many of them seem somewhat deformed or blind in one eye (probably from an irradiated apocalyptic fall out, which has not actually affected these people, who never change much no matter how much the world changes).
>
> I find it hard to see how radiation could make a lot of people blind in /one/ eye.

The same way smoking can ruin one of your lungs. People with two bad 
lungs die and are not observed; the wogs with two blind eyes die for 
lack of care or stay indoors for safety and are not observed. People 
with one good lung and one good eye can still be seen going about their 
impaired business.

>> because the language of the area is completely indistinguishable to the narrator and Sanderson, who supposedly speaks “Wog”.
>>    Only a great, great passage of time could have made the language completely unintelligible to him.

or 2-3 generations of occupation by xenophones, which is fairly common 
per millenium.


>> (the children are described as thin or bow-bellied and generally unhealthy looking)
>
> Thin or bow-bellied means starving.

There's also malnutrition issues that can make the child potbellied, 
bowing outward.


-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at clueland.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >