Chapter VI – Higher Earning
Apologies for letting the thread lie fallow for a bit; I’ve just gone on sabbatical from my job, and the last two weeks were rather hectic as I wrapped up everything that needed doing for the next two months. On the plus side, today’s update is a meaty one, and the remainder should come out pretty expeditiously given that I don’t have frivolous distractions like “making a living” to worry about!
Last time on the thread, we’d learned that our compatriot Brock had gone to view a technology demonstration at the Bureau before he failed to make the rendezvous; with more gumption than sense, we’re going in there to recover his body rescue him. That will require an invitation to the demo, which we know Alex’s advisor, Professor Waterstone, has in his possession (since he’s a word-studies mucky-muck at the university). Fortunately, we’re just down the street from the college quarter of Anglophone Atlantis, hanging out in the high-concept lounge of the Fleur d’Or hotel. Before I head out, I remember I never got around to turning the jigsaw puzzle we found into something more exciting:
>show jigsaw
“What do you make of this?” we ask, showing off the jigsaw.
She shrugs good-naturedly, hits the jigsaw with the paddle, and grins at us. We look down at what we’re holding: It’s a portable power saw with the ability to slice right through wood or plastic. Dewalt cordless, if you’re interested, with a massive battery.
Yeah, we can get in some trouble with that.
We also plink out some songs on the piano in the lobby as we depart:
>play piano
We pick out a church hymn you heard a lot in your youth.
…
We pick out my mother’s favourite Atlantean folk tune.
…
We pick out some vaguely remembered commercial jingles from your childhood.
(I still have the Britishising googles on).
Fun enough, but we probably shouldn’t quit our day job. South down Long Street takes us to:
Palm Square
Now this is my part of town: Palm Square is the beginning of the university district. To the southeast, through the iron gate, is the university campus proper; and that unobtrusive little doorway directly south of us leads into the Babel Café.
I live in the apartment complex that runs along the west side of the square ? in fact, my apartment door is immediately to the southwest.
“Babel” sounds like a faintly-subversive name here on Atlantis, so it fits the bohemian local character, I think.
>x apartment
I know it’s a bit shabby, but you know what graduate stipends are like. Or maybe you don’t. My parents help with the rent, but it’s still nothing spectacular.
>x gate
The campus as a whole is walled and gated because of the amount of linguistic research that happens inside. This is a very lightweight form of security, more symbolic than anything, with much more significant protections on the really powerful materials.
I have the student ring that opens this back in my apartment. I just wasn’t expecting to need to go in there ever again.
Well, that last is an interesting data point re Alex’s expectations for … whatever we’re doing with him. We could get through this gate six different ways, I’m sure, but might as well get that ring if only to see what his digs are like. I misread the map, though, and instead of going through the front door to the southwest, I type W:
That way lies the bathroom window of my apartment. Though in fact, if you have a mind to break in, it’s the easiest way: it’s not hard to force the window.
>x window
It is one of those windows that slides sideways open. The latch is broken, so it can’t actually be secured.
What are the odds that we’re gonna break in?
>sw
If we want to go into my apartment, we’re going to have to climb in my window. Here, let me just streamline this process for us.
I appreciate how nobody involved is treating this as any kind of a barrier.
The window slides open with a hideous protesting shriek.
“Halt! You! Young person!”
It’s my neighbour, Mrs Parsnip, leaning out from her apartment above us. Mrs Parsnip and I don’t interact except about once a month when she comes around to ask for my spare change for bus fare or the laundry.
“Clear off or I’ll call the police!” she shouts.
There’s another input prompt, but regardless of what I type Alex takes over:
…No, don’t worry, I’ll handle this.
I step us back and stare up at her. “I’m a friend of Alex,” I say. “He called and asked me to stop by because he thought he left the stove on. Said he climbs in the window all the time when he gets locked out.”
“That’s true,” she says. “Shouldn’t be allowed out by himself. Okay, go ahead.”
In a mutter she adds, “Not like he has anything worth stealing anyway.” She vanishes from view.
The window is uncomfortably high and it takes a little scramble to get in, but soon we are inside.
Apartment Bathroom
An antique nightstand of my mother’s, which does not actually fit anywhere near my bed, is jammed into one corner of the bathroom. On the nightstand are a key and a ring.
The bathroom window gives some weak sunlight.
We could climb back out the window, or we could go south into the rest of my apartment.
>x nightstand
It is wobbly, scratched, and chipped, which is the state in which my mother likes her antiques.
On the nightstand are a key and a ring.
>x key
It’s made of an extremely ordinary blank.
The key unlocks the apartment door.
>x ring
A gold-toned ring that from a distance would look like a signet. In fact the face of it is figured with the symbol of the university, an owl biting the letter A in its beak. Embedded in this face is the tiny RFID tag that opens generic university security.
It is the perfect combination of technical paranoia and old-fashioned pretentiousness, and one is assigned to every new student with great pomp on the day of orientation.
The ring unlocks the sturdy iron gate to the university.
At first glance, the setup here is a little confusing – who on God’s green earth puts their keys in the bathroom? – but actually I think it all makes sense. Alex didn’t want to just leave his front door unlocked, but also didn’t want to bring his key with him when he went to join with Andra, because beyond not expecting to return, he didn’t want to carry anything that could unnecessarily be tracked back to his old identity. But instead of doing the obvious thing – leaving, locking the door from the outside, and ditching the key – he was sufficiently conscientious/used to popping in through the bathroom window that he decided to exit that way too, leaving his keys on the table on his way out.
Anyway, we grab the ring and key so we can make it out the regular way; Mrs. Parsnip would surely get suspicious if she saw us leaving the same way we arrived.
First, though:
>remove n from ring
We reset the device to n. There is a smell of anise, and the ring turns into a rig. A whole collection of lighting units on poles and stands.
The rig is currently switched off.
The rig is too heavy to carry, and we almost drop it, but I manage to set the poles down mostly stably and, for a wonder, without breaking anything.
…that could be handy in specific circumstances, I suppose, but let’s slap some gel on so we can use the ring for its intended purpose. Then we close the window behind us (“I feel obscurely better now”, says Alex, though of course we can’t lock it) and head south in to the main body of the flat:
My Apartment
I should point out my copy of The Problem of Adjectives. I should have taken it back to the library – I meant to take it back to the library – but there just wasn’t time. The last couple of hours before I came to meet you were frantic. The way I figured it, my parents or someone will come looking for me and they’ll take it back for me. I think.
I’d apologise for the mess, but should we really be here? I’m reconciled to leaving all my things behind, you know. You made me promise that I didn’t mind.
Alex being fixated on an overdue library book feels extremely in character. That’s in interesting title, though:
>x problem
It’s not my book; it belongs to the department, as we can see from the fact that it’s stamped LANGUAGE STUDIES DEPARTMENT : SEMINAR ROOM inside.
I got it out because it provides a general overview of adjectival “adherence” – that is, how and when an adjective is so much part of the name of something that it can be affected by tools like your N-remover, and when it is purely incidental.
I see I may be losing you. Shall I put this in layman’s terms? >>
My poor sweet Alex, don’t you know us better by now?
>no
Okay, then.
In general, strongly-adhering adjectives produce problems by preventing conversions that might otherwise be possible; conversely, it is difficult to make objects with particular characteristics because those characteristics are described by weakly-adhering adjectives.
The point is: it is possible to use linguistic tools to create water. It is not reliably possible, at least in American English, to use those tools to create potable water, because “potable” is a weakly-adhering adjective describing a statistically uncommon trait. This means that linguistic reification is helpless to solve water supply problems, even in third-world regions using a high-efficacy language. For that matter even when a word has a strongly-adhering adjective, the interference of that adjective usually just makes the object impossible to reify at all.
What we need, therefore, is a language with nouns that uniquely specify substances’ desirable traits: “potable” or “pure” water should be named something distinct from adulterated forms of H2O, and so on.
Have I bored you enough yet? >>
GIVE US MORE!
Scientific jargon does, of course, exist to specify objects uniquely, but there are two problems. One is that most chemical and biological terminology is used by such a small subset of the population that it has near-zero linguistic efficacy: creating a substance by formula requires an amount of energy roughly on par with pointing a w-remover at Aberystwyth. This is not a realistic solution to resource problems.
The second difficulty is that even with well-known exceptions such as “H2O”, the formula is not usually not a linguistic subset of the formula of another widely available and well-known substance.
Hence the need for a new language with nouns designed based on careful scientific research into the primary needs and resources of living in a given region. This language could then be systematically taught to everyone dwelling in that area, causing permanent economic uplift.
“Systematically taught” is a bit of a problem, since it would take massive funding and effort to make the language known widely enough to gain linguistic efficacy. And there would be significant issues in not totally crowding out indigenous languages and thus destroying an existing culture.
But I have high hopes, assuming I can ever get out of this repressive little burg and make my case to one or more of the major world relief organisations.
This was a bit of an infodump, I suppose, but a super interesting one, as it lays out some fun extrapolations of the metaphysics while confirming what’s on the flash drive and how it relates to Alex’s motivation to get out of dodge. Funnily enough, we anticipated some of this in the thread’s earlier discussion of conlags, and the necessity of promoting them so people wind up actually speaking them. Alex’s plan is a bit naive and idealistic, it’s true – but there are worse things to be.
Now that our attention has been drawn to the book, we get a more complete location description when we look:
My Apartment
My futon is on the floor in the opposite corner. On top is The Problem of Adjectives.
It’s an efficiency: note the kitchen area, with all the usual appliances, in one corner. My mother attempted to provide a microwave, rice cooker, toaster, waffle iron, and julienne-fry-maker, but I pointed out that these objects would triple-populate the two square feet of available counter space.
On the counter are Journal of Third-World Economics and Studies in Primary Language Acquisition.
We grab the book on general principles:
>take adjectives
We take The Problem of Adjectives. Might as well return it to the department seminar room, as long as we’re going that way.
>x journal
This is just Volume 16, but I subscribed annually for a while. My whole plan is useless unless there’s a well-designed language that actually takes account of economic reality in the target region. When I’ve moved somewhere outside Atlantis it will be easier to conduct that part of the research.
>x studies
This is a little outside my field, but I have been trying to work out the feasibility of my plans, from the perspective of language teaching.
We grab these too – maybe we’ll eventually need some studs?
>x kitchen
I have a sink, stove, refrigerator, cabinets, a countertop: the usual.
The appliances are minimally implemented, of course – the kitchen is the bane of many an IF author, and there’s no upside for the player of prompting to fuss with a bunch of dials and doors that don’t do much of anything – but there is a fun discovery in the fridge:
>x yoghurt
It is the gooseberry fool flavor, left over from a six-pack. I always eat the strawberry and peach first.
Okay, I feel guilty about leaving this to go bad, but I was in a rush ? I did get rid of most of the rest of my food over the last couple of days, but I just never had time to eat this. And it seemed wrong to throw it out. Sue me.
First, “gooseberry fool”? Atlantis’s orthography may be American, but seems like the cuisine remained British. Second, speaking of, I thought it would be funny to yoink the h out of “yoghurt” to see if that would change it to a more normal flavor, but:
>remove h from yoghurt
We reset the device to h. The letter-remover finds no h in the yoghurt.
I forgot, the goggles are just cosmetic!
(At this point I take them off, to avoid any future confusion).
Poking around at the futon, we get prompted with another memory of “how it started with Brock” – I think this is the second one we’ve encountered with this exact title, so I guess they’re part of a sequence?
Café, Marseilles
Brock was scowling into his drink. “I don’t know, Andra. Are you going to flip on me again if we try to be together? I’m not blaming you for your parents, and… honestly, I’m surprised how much you’ve been able to assemble yourself into someone new. But jeezus.”
“What happened to your thing about how everyone goes through life hurting everyone else a little bit, like radiation?” you asked. “But mostly people heal, and it’s worth it?”
“Yeah, that’s true,” he said. “But you still don’t go into the reactor core with no suit, if you see what I mean.”
You tilted your head. “You weathered it pretty well when you and Annalisa split up.”
He swirled the melted ice in the bottom of his glass. “Is this what you’re fishing for?” he said. “For me to tell you you’re special, you’re different, I care about you more and therefore it would ruin everything if we ever broke up?”
You didn’t answer.
“It would ruin everything,” he says. “Because you’re on my crew. But as to the girlfriend thing, I have no idea. We don’t know each other that way.”
Then we’re back in the present.
…yeah, dating a member of your crew does seem like a risky issue when you put it like that, but based on her behavior it seems like Andra really does care for Brock quite a lot.
I’m also now wondering whether, based on her name, Annalisa was also a gestalt being, and therefore whether Brock has a synthesis-fetish (come on, you don’t date someone named “Andra” in this world without part of you wondering what might happen if you meet the right Alex…)
Anyway I spend a lot of time messing with the futon, but turns out it’s not the convertible kind. Nothing more to do here, so we depart:
>ne
We’re about to, when the door to the street opens and my mother walks into the room. She shuts it behind her and puts away her key before she notices us. Then she stands very still. For about a quarter second she considers calling the police, but I can see that worry passing away again as she takes in our clothing, age, and general demeanor.
“Hi there,” she says, coming forward to take our hand. “I’m Mrs. Rosehip. Alex Rosehip’s mother. You must be a friend of his?”
We want to say we’re his girlfriend.
Oh good lord, this is awful timing, and this idea (is it more Andra’s or Alex’s?) is supremely embarrassing, but at least it feels like we should be able to bluff our way out of this.
>x mom
She is a tall woman with short brown hair expertly cut, and a tailored suit.
She has in addition a certain air which is very rare on this island: the air of seeming not to care whether anyone is watching her, or whether she is exhibiting the proper respect for authority.
>greet mom
We already have the attention of my mother.
She gives the refrigerator door a little push and it swings closed.
Mother just stands there with an arched eyebrow. Any minute now I’m going to blurt something out through sheer force of habit.
(I think the tidying is a little idle-behavior function displaying at a slightly odd moment, but cleaning up your college kid’s apartment without really thinking about it is a plausible bit of character business, I think!)
>say we’re his girlfriend
“Yes – sort of. We’ve been… I mean, we’ve been on a few dates.” That’s you, and I have to say you don’t sound as keen on dating ourself as you might.
She raises her eyebrows. “I see. How secretive of him not to bring you around. And where is Alex now? I need to speak with him. He’s been hard to reach lately.”
I know you think it’s a bit sketchy that my mother just walks into my apartment when I’m not around, but I swear to you she’s never done that before. She must be more worried about something than she’s letting on.
We could claim to have seen him this morning or say we don’t know.
Huh, that’s a tricky one – better not to get ourselves in trouble weaving over-elaborate lies, I think:
>say we don’t know
“I don’t know,” we say.
“A communicative couple, then,” she says dryly. My mother has never been very nice to girlfriends she considered stupid.
Mother appears to be meditating about the sink tap.
“How well do you know him?” Mother asks. She immediately catches herself, and adds: “I’m not inquiring into the details of your relationship. But I am concerned about him. He has seemed very unhappy recently about his work. Has he said anything to you about that? Wanting to leave the program, or change careers, or… anything?”
I didn’t think she’d noticed.
We want to reassure Mother or suggest the truth.
Another freighted choice, but again, sticking to the truth makes it less likely we’ll get caught out (and is probably ultimately kinder to her, to boot).
>suggest the truth
“I think he feels that there are things linguistic studies could accomplish if we were less hampered by local laws and corporate interests,” we say. “Big improvements to quality of life for the poor, for instance.”
She looks at us keenly. “Did he say what he intended to do about that?”
I’m inclined to say we wouldn’t do anything dangerous.
>we wouldn’t do anything dangerous
“I’m sure he wouldn’t do anything dangerous,” we lie. “After all, his ideas wouldn’t be useful to anyone if he were arrested.”
“No, of course!” But I think she knows we’re lying about something, even if she is not sure what that something is.
Mother spaces out a bit, contemplating our backpack.
“Well,” Mother says. “I had better go. If you do see Alex, tell him to call me, please. It isn’t an emergency, but you can tell him there’s a bit of Bureau business I’d like to discuss with him.”
We nod, and suddenly it is borne in on me that this may be the last I see of my mother in a lifetime: and I’m trying to memorize the exact cut of her hair and the way her expensive Italian heels tap on the floor, and meanwhile she is going out completely indifferent to the moment. I could have stood for our previous meeting to be the last one – we had dinner and she hugged me goodbye then. This makes it all much much worse.
And you, you’re nattering at me in our head, asking what she meant about the Bureau. It might be, I guess, that they’ve been watching me and that she got wind of it. That would be likely. But if so it doesn’t matter, not any more.
She’s not even visible through the window any longer.
…I’m more on Andra’s side of the worrisome vs. wistful view of how this encounter ended (did she see something poking out of our backpack?) but it appears there’s no immediate danger, so best to try to get that invitation quickly.
But not before a quick pit-stop at the café after we exit and re-lock the door:
Babel Café
Through many changes of management, this institution has fed the denizens of the university and ignored their semi-sedition.
A clerk in a white apron stands behind the long glass case. In the long glass case are a pocket-bread, a wrap, and a honey pastry triangle.
The tables are square wooden things painted dark blue (not the vibrant blue of the Bureau, but something closer to midnight), and the upper surfaces are découpaged with antique travel postcards.
A blue plaque is mounted on the wall.
The clerk grins at us in a welcoming way.
You know, we haven’t eaten all day, so this might be a reasonable detour. Let’s take in the decor:
>x tables
The surfaces depict, fragmented, such exotic locations as Giza, Beijing, and Sioux City, Iowa. There is even an advertisement for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.
The exoticism of these destinations lies more in their spelling than their sights, I think. The second bit is probably an 1893: A World’s Fair Mystery reference (need to play that one day too…)
>x plaque
On this site in 1969 the theoretical groundwork for Q-insertion was laid by James Elias and Milford Higgate using five drinking straws and a bowl of oatmeal.
Ah, so the theory of insertion goes back reasonably far, but we’re only now getting into the prototype stage. Seems a plausible pace for progress.
Let’s check out the grub:
>x bread
It’s round, flat bread suitable for eating with dips.
>x wrap
It’s a construction of flat bread wrapped around rice, chickpeas, and sauce.
>x triangle
Despite its enforced linguistic transformation, it still looks delicious: fine layers of crisp filo with nuts and honey between.
That last description gives the game away – this is a pita, falafel wrap (I think?), and baklava, flattened and Englishized in a confusing way (thus “filo” rather than “phyllo” too). Turns out there are real down-sides to impoverishing your language’s vocabulary by forbidding import-words!
Let’s get them all:
>x clerk
A smooth-faced young man. He has the cheery demeanor of one earning substantial overtime pay.
He doesn’t have any dialogue topics that I can find (ASKing him about a food item just has you buy it), but he does engage in a little bit of chit-chat: “enjoy” upon handing over the baklava, “nice day for a picnic, isn’t it?” for the wrap, and “you’ve just about cleared us out!” when I take the bread too.
My linguistic tools can’t do much with the bread (it’s got “pocket-” superglued on, of course), the triangle (if I ever get a double-remove, it could make a tangle?), or the wrap (“rap” is too abstract to reify, of course), but we might as well hang on to them instead of eating them, for … reasons.
Let’s get to campus:
>se
We unlock the sturdy iron gate.
We open the sturdy iron gate.
University Oval
This is the center of the university, a broad grassy oval shaded with sycamore trees and surrounded by buildings in brick or white stone.
An activist is standing in our way, gripping a sign that says “TOXI WASTE AWARENESS!”.
Immediately south of here is the building where I spend most of my time, Samuel Johnson Hall.
“Do you have a minute to help save the environment?” the activist asks brightly.
I’d like to say no or say yes.
I actually laughed out loud here – I used to work for an advocacy organization that ran street canvasses, and that greeting is word-for-word one we would use. I’m guessing most academics are pretty familiar with this kind of thing, though!
Anyway, we’re in a rush, but it’s always nice to at least acknowledge the humanity of the folks doing this work (so long as it’s a reasonable cause):
>yes
“Sure: why not?” we say.
“Wonderful!” she beams.
She sets down the sign in order to free her hands for more expressive argument. “Listen, we’re trying to gain financial support to make a major advertising campaign pushing the concept of toxi waste throughout the anglophone world. If you know anything about linguistic efficacy, I’m sure you can imagine the implications.”
I can, in fact, imagine the implications, probably a little better than she would like.
We want to encourage the activist to elaborate on the implications.
Oh no, Alex is getting ready to be a bit of a ponce, isn’t he?
>encourage the activist
“Oh?” we say neutrally. This is all it takes.
“Toxi waste would be, in concept, a completely harmless, safe, and neutral substance that would have no detrimental impact on the surrounding environment. By raising awareness of toxi waste throughout the Anglophone world, we would put the collective consciousness to work for the environment! It would then be possible for volunteer workers to convert large stocks of dangerous toxic waste into the safe, neutral toxi waste using minimal energy.”
We want to ask how consciousness will be raised or ask how the campaign will address problems of visualization.
>ask about visualization
“Studies have shown that linguistic efficacy is drastically harder to achieve when the body of speakers does not have a consensus about how to visualize the object in question,” we point out, settling into our element. I’ve had so many undergraduates with ideas just like this one, all eager to tell me how they’re going to change the world. I suppose I have exactly the same problem, only on a grander scale.
My comment seems to have gotten her a little lost, though, so I add, “People need to have some image to attach to the term you’re inventing for them. Otherwise, it will be much harder to achieve functional awareness levels.”
“Oh! Yes, I left that part out,” she says. “Our ad campaign will include extensive imagery of what we envision toxi waste to look like – that is, a clear, odorless liquid.”
I’d like to ask how consciousness will be raised, ask whether this liquid will be water, or ask whether this liquid will also be flavorless.
>ask about water
“Is the role of toxi waste by any chance going to be played by, say, filtered water?” we ask.
Her eyebrows crinkle together. “Yes – well, maybe,” she says. “Why?”
We want to warn the activist about term-reassignment.
>warn
“Because,” we say, “if you show people pictures of what is obviously water, they will continue thinking of it as water – not as toxi waste, or whatever you want them to call it. Studies have shown that people’s word concepts are very persistent in that way – and anyway there are a variety of reasons why even if you could do it, it would be very bad to overwrite the linguistic efficacy of ‘water’.”
She purses her lips. “You’re in Language Studies, aren’t you?” she asks. “I was warned about people from your department. You can be very negative.”
I’d like to point out that being from Language Studies does not make us wrong.
>point out
“Negative or not, it is true,” we say. “If you try to teach people a new word for an existing substance, you have to fight with their preconceptions about how to categorize that substance. If, on the other hand, you try to make them think of a new and as-yet-non-existent substance, you have less control over what happens when it reifies – the result might not be quite what you wanted.”
“All right,” she says belligerently. “How would you do it?”
At this precise moment I feel myself fall for this girl. She’s still naive and earnest and probably too young for me, but there is something about the determination and assertion and the spirit of I-dare-you-to-think-of-one-better that makes me want to drag her off to a coffee shop and enlighten her for four or five hours.
But I bet you wouldn’t like to play gooseberry to that expedition.
We could explain about our plans.
…so what Alex is really looking for in a romantic partner is “someone you can lecture”? He’d been growing on me through this sequence, but oof, buddy, you gotta do some work on yourself before you get out there.
>explain
“To do this really right,” I say, under our breath so that no one will overhear us, “you have to think even bigger than you have been. Forget English. Forget Mandarin Chinese. Forget Spanish, Hindi, Russian, Arabic. You have to make a new language to resolve these difficulties, and you have to teach it on an epic scale.”
She has been leaning in, breathlessly, to listen to this explanation, but now she backs up and looks at us like we’ve sprouted a second head, which, all things considered, would not be all that unnatural.
“That would take forever!” she exclaims. (I had calculated maybe fifty or a hundred years to the first significant successes, but I suppose that is not unlike forever if you’re sufficiently short-sighted.) “And you’d need a huge amount of money!”
I sigh. “All the same,” we say, a little sadly. “It would work better than what you’re proposing here. I’m sorry. I wish I thought it would work.”
She watches us with interest. “The next few months are critical to our operation,” the activist says. “We need to be able to blitz multiple countries simultaneously with an intense and outrageous advertising campaign that will garner further media coverage from news sources and provoke discussion on the internet and in the workplace. But in order to do that, we need the funding to place high profile advertisements in a variety of places. That’s why donations from people like yourself are going to be so very necessary.”
We could donate.
>donate
Oh, you’re not seriously going to – oh, god, you are. You know, this is never going to work. There are sound scientific reasons why – oh FINE.
We hand over some of your money – I guess I should console myself that it is yours – to the girl.
“Thanks!” she says brightly. Tucking the bill into her pocket, she gives a little skip and heads off across the oval to accost some other innocent.
You just enriched some random television network, you understand. That money won’t do a lick of good to anyone else.
Alex isn’t wrong that paid-media strategies are almost always expensive and ineffective for advocacy campaigns, but like most academics he’s too hung up on getting the policy right, when what’s most important is building the organizing infrastructure – getting attention and funding folks to do the work of engaging more people is how you win. Hopefully some of what we just donated will go to that stuff, rather than just media consultants.
Er, where were we?
>University Oval
This is the center of the university, a broad grassy oval shaded with sycamore trees and surrounded by buildings in brick or white stone.
Immediately south of here is the building where I spend most of my time, Samuel Johnson Hall.
A sign lies on the grass, abandoned by its owner.
>x sign
The sign is bright yellow and says “TOXI WASTE AWARENESS!”
I’d love to be able to turn this into a sin, or if we get a diminutive affixer we could pull that same trick the cop did, so we’ll grab it even though we’ve got no immediate use for it.
>x hall
When it was built in the '30s, the whole purpose was to prove to the rest of the faculty the tremendous value of the new field of language studies (as opposed to language engineering, a field long valued for its ability to produce tools and, more importantly, weapons).
Consequently, Samuel Johnson Hall was built to impress: a blind windowless front of white stone rising grandly from the pavement; an oppressive portico that makes entering figures look tiny.
Samuel Johnson was an 18th-century man of letters who in this day and age is perhaps most famous as the first person to be famous for being famous – inasmuch as he’s best known because of the bon-mot-stuffed biography written about him by his junior colleague, Boswell. But presumably the Altantean builders wanted to celebrate the achievement of his Dictionary, which he compiled by himself and which from my understanding was the authoritative reference for the English language until the OED came along over a century later.
>x trees
They’re handsome old trees – the same white-trunked hybrids that line the avenues of Provence, I’m told, growing several stories tall and creating a tolerable shade even on very hot days.
>x buildings
Of the original 1757 foundation of the University, little now remains, and the oldest building on campus is the administration building, a Georgian creation of white steps and columns, ca. 1780. That’s further east, though, and the buildings here around the Oval are mostly from the enormous expansion of the university in 1911-1940, when the publication of the New Orthodox Orthography caused a rapid expansion in language-related disciplines.
Some fun world-building here, and I have some fun trying the nonfunctional exits – from which I learn that there’s a business school to the north, and the path we’re on continues east as Sycamore Walk – but the only place we can go is south.
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