Babel-17

by Samuel R. Delany

They say the hustlers paint their lips with blood.

“But you see the problem a ‘foreigner’ has transcribing a language he doesn’t speak; he may come out with too many distinctions of sound, or not enough.”

I’d be mad as a damp rooster

We have to go to another language in order to think about the problem clearly without going through all sorts of roundabout paths for the proper aspects of what we want to deal with.”

“Apparently your automatic James Bond ran berserk,” Rydra told Ver Dorco. “…Bond?” “A mythological reference.

If there’s no word for it, how do you think about it? And, if there isn’t the proper form, you don’t have the how even if you have the words.

An individual, a thing apart from its environment, and apart from all things in that environment; an individual was a type of thing for which symbols were inadequate, and so names were invented.

Thinking in Babel-17 was like suddenly seeing all the way down through water to the bottom of a well that a moment ago you’d thought was only a few feet deep. She reeled with vertigo.

“Butcher, there are certain ideas which have words for them. If you don’t know the words, you can’t know the ideas. And if you don’t have the idea, you don’t have the answer.”

In the beginning was the word. That’s how somebody tried to explain it once. Until something is named, it doesn’t exist.

“I was no I before, but now there is a reason to stay free. I will not be caught again. There is a reason.” “What is it, Butcher?” “Because I am,” he said softly, “and you are.”

But I feel like she’s my…friend. I’m a lonely man, in a city of lonely men. And when you find some place where…communications are working, you come back to see if they’ll work again.”