You fight like a dairy-farmer.

I always used to get into trouble with people because I say a lot of things I don't mean. Or, rather, I mean them, but other people don't understand what I mean and think I mean something else, which amounts to the same thing from their frame of reference. It doesn't help that much of what I used to say that they didn't understand sounded like insults. Sometimes they weren't--sometimes they were true statements that I actually meant as compliments but due to disparities in ethical philosophies were considered insults by them--but that's not what I want to talk about, because those are easy to explain. I think this a is right, they think a is wrong, I tell them they're a and they flip out. Mathematics.

While I'm using the past tense throughout, of course, none of this is really gone, though it doesn't happen as often as it used to.

Anyway. The other cases, when they were insults, or sort-of, or whatever, are more interesting, because they're more complicated. I learned early on that words were words and that's all they were; that is, an insult was a sound out of someone's mouth and nothing more unless you made it more. ("Sticks and stones can break my bones / but words will never hurt me" was my motto back in the day. Not that I was a particularly bullied child, because I was actually a fairly sociable child in my younger years and anyway most would-be bullies learned quickly that I was quite willing to apply that mantra to the offensive as well as the defensive.) Since then I've always had a strange relationship with language: a fascination, to be sure (I'm an English major, after all), but also a detachment, an awareness of how fragile language is, how easily it can be broken and tossed aside, all its illusory control and power dispersed in a flash, like a flame consuming a cloud of gas.

Spook Country is William Gibson's (of Neuromancer fame) latest novel, a sequel (at least in the manner of Gibson's sequels) to his last, Pattern Recognition. PR is one of my favorite books; I consider it Gibson's second-best after Neuromancer. SC, while a good read and certainly better than much of today's popular fiction, doesn't quite stand up to its predecessor.