As soon as he heard Varcek's uproar in the hall, he could
emerge, dripping bathwater and innocence, to find out what the fuss was
all about.... Do you know anything about something called General
Semantics?" he asked suddenly.
"Yes. Before I married Lane, I went around with a radio ad-writer," she
told him. "He was a nice boy, but he'd get drunker than a boiled owl
about once a month, and weep about his crimes against sanity and meaning.
He'd recite long excerpts from his professional creations, and show how
he had been deliberately objectifying words and identifying them with the
things for which they stood, and confusing orders of abstraction, and
juggling multiordinal meanings. He was going to lend me his Koran, a book
called _Science and Sanity_, and then he took a job with an ad agency in
Chicago, and I got married, and--"
Rand nodded. "Then you realize that the word is not the thing spoken of,
and that the inference is not the description, and that we cannot know
'all' about anything. Etcetera," he added hastily, like a Papist signing
himself with the Cross. "Well, some considerable disregard of these
principles seems to have existed in this case. Dunmore is seen in a
bathrobe, his feet bare and making wet tracks on the floor, his hair wet,
etcetera.
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