the Orin-Hal phone call

Hal defines the word that names the whole anti-Entertainment family, and the etymology he supplies is quietly perfect: samizdat is self-publishing, "self" plus "to publish," sub-rosa dissemination of what the state has banned. The irony deepens on the "self" — the lethal cartridge is a self-published work that erases the self, self-dissemination that dissolves the disseminated. And Hal's confident coda, "there's no real samizdat in the U.S. per se, First Amendment-wise," is the setup for the whole scene's wrongness: he reasons that a nation of total free speech can have no forbidden self-published work, not knowing that the truly dangerous samizdat isn't banned by law but by lethality — a thing no First Amendment need forbid because it kills everyone who receives it. The word gets its scholarly gloss from the one character who can't apply it to the object it most describes.