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say that the extra B is, not a variant in the form of expression, but rather a fresh feature to add to it. Adam puts the problem to one side for the time being. His immediate interest is to continue the language experiment dealing with the apple, and this recent discovery has sidetracked him. He now wants to try writing (or saying) something more complex. He wants to say «inedible is bad, which is apple ugly and blue», and here is how he sets about writing it: |
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The text is now in a vertical column. And two curious formal characteristics of the message force themselves onto Adam's attention: there is a progressive increase in the length of words (this represents the establishment of a rhythm), and, second, each of the five sequences ends with the same letter (this represents a primitive model of rhyme). All of a sudden Adam is swept away by the incantatory power (the epode) of language. So God's commandment was justified, he thinks to himself: the sinfulness of the apple is underlined and emphasized by a kind of formal necessity which requires that the apple be ugly and blue. Adam is so persuaded by this apparent indivisibility of form and content that he begins to believe that nomina sint numina. He decides to go even further than this: he decides to reinforce both the rhythm and the rhyme by inserting elements of calculated redundancy in his already unquestionably poetic statement: |
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By now his 'poetic' ambitions are clearly aroused! The idea that nomina sint numina has fired his imagination. With an almost Heideggerian sense of false etymology, he starts by noticing that the word for «apple» (BAAAB) ends with the letter B, just like all those words which refer specifically to BB things, bad things, like badness, ugliness, and blue. The first impression made on Adam by the poetic use of language is a growing conviction that language is part of the natural order of things, easily conceived by analogy with the world it depicts and held in gestation by obscure onomatopoeic impulses of the soul; language is the authorized voice of God. We can see that Adam tends to use poetic experience to put the clock back, in a rather reactionary key: through language the gods |
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