IJ study archive

Hal at the Inner-Infant meeting (pp. 796–797)

quote

passed the last fifteen minutes of the dull drive considering the probable etymological career of the word Anonymous, all the way he supposed from the Æolic through Thynne’s B.S. 1580s reference to ‘anonymall Chronicals’; and whether it was joined way back somewhere at the Saxonic taproot to the Olde English on-áne, which supposedly meant All as One or As One Body and became Cynewulf’s eventual standard inversion to the classic anon, maybe. […] Then called up on his mnemonic screen the developmental history since B.S. ’35 of the initial Substance group AA, on which there’d been such a lengthy entry in the Discursive O.E.D. that Hal hadn’t had to hit any sort of outside database to feel more or less factually prepared to drop into its spin-off NA and at least give the thing an appraising once-over. […] Hal can summon a kind of mental Xerox of anything he’d ever read and basically read it all over again, at will, which talent the Abandonment of Hope hasn’t (so far) compromised, the withdrawal’s effects being more like emotional/salivo-digestive.

Context

Hal, a week-plus off marijuana and falling apart, drives the E.T.A. tow truck fifty clicks to scout an NA meeting — and spends the drive doing philology on the word Anonymous, Æolic to Thynne to Cynewulf, then reading the mental Xerox of the "Discursive O.E.D." entry on AA in lieu of any actual feeling about what he's driving toward. The lexical prodigy's signature move at its most naked: etymology as anesthetic, facts as a substitute for asking for help. (The archaic spellings are as the text has them.)

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