Mutual detection: the Falls Church file, and the word "transperçant"

pivotal · 11 Nov YDAU

• When: 11 Nov YDAU — the espionage subtext of the same bleacher dialogue.
• What: Beneath the friendly surface, each is making the other. Steeply's side: the chat earns Poutrincourt a security pull — "it is for certain that a certain 'journalist' will be e-mailing Falls Church VA on the U.S.O.'s Clipper-proof line for the unexpurgated files on one 'Poutrincourt, Thierry T.'" Poutrincourt's side: a single word gives her away as already knowing. Steeply registers her use of "the vulgate Québecois transperçant, whose idiomatic connotation of doom Poutrincourt shouldn't have had any reason to think the Parisian-speaking Steeply would know," and the endnote draws the conclusion flat: this "is the slip that indicates that Poutrincourt's figured out that Steeply is neither a civilian soft-profiler nor even a female" — "which Poutrincourt's probably known ever since Steeply'd lit his Flanderfume with the elbow of his lighter-arm out instead of in, which only males and radically butch lesbians ever do." The narration adds that noticing such a chink "would require an almost professionally hypervigilant and suspicious person" — the closest the book comes to saying outright what Thierry Poutrincourt is.