Hopefully my postings are remaining coherent. I’ve been working insane hours lately, and have more or less stopped sleeping. This is actually having a fairly positive effect on me: It means I’m up and around to take care of the baby down in my office so Kath can get some sleep (she’s so alert that if the baby so much as whimpers or cries for ten seconds, she wakes right up. At which point the baby drifts back off to sleep, leaving Kath’s slumber constantly interrupted.)
It also means that while working on the next Apropos novel, “Tong Lashing,” my mind becomes so demented that I actually come up with lines like this:
“We made our way much further north than even my peregrinations as the Peacelord had taken me. As a consequence, we were able to enter with impunity a particularly sizable port city, Port Debras, renowned for having the largest single dock in the entire land, known as the Grand Jetty.”
Two points for figuring this out without cracking a dictionary.
PAD
• 
Great line. Maybe your publisher should sell it and a dictionary as a bundle. Some people would have to buy it just so they could wonder what type of book needs a dictionary with it.
peregrinations- Task, job, or travels? Close? In the ball park?
My guess on the word is it has something to do with a peregrine hawk — that’s a hunting bird — uh so making a noun about hunting might mean the activity of searching and tracking prey?
Anyhow, thanks for posting even on no sleep! We’ll all definitely forgive you if you end up crashing for a few days… right guys and gals?
New episode of Charmed tonight — new episode of Dead Zone (sounds disappointing from the commercial), but then we only seem to really chat up Buffy here.
; )
– Rachel
Hehe…I think I figured it out, but now I don’t want to ruin it for anyone else. 🙂
Of course, it’s a little easier if you know some Latin…
I think that there’s a sexual reference there with the huge jetty. I’m guessing Port DeBras is a joke referencing the parting of the legs, as in Part De Bras. I thought bra referenced the arms though.
Hmmm, going strictly from flawed and faded memory I’m going to venture…a ballet reference?
“Grand Jette” or something like that?
I kept just wondering if it had something to do with the names of the places, since I couldn’t find any really obscure words inside the text. It wasn’t until someone mentioned peregrinations that I rememebred that the common english term is pilgrimages. That’s what happens when a word like that sounds just like the one in your native language.
Sounds a bit rude, eh?
If you’re writing incoherently, does this mean we might get some more useful Xenexian curse words in the next New Frontier novel? 😀
Nothing useful to add, but there is the famous Seurat pointilist painting “Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of Grande Jatte.” (The one that freaks Cameron out in the museum sequence of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
Something to do with Debbie Does Dallas?
Something as good as Grozit? 😀
The paragraph makes perfect sense to me. Of course, I’m reading it at 2:30 in the morning. Maybe it’s only comprehensible when you’re half-asleep.
The vocabulary actually didn’t bother me. I did have problems wading through the four lines of text with no periods, though. Talk about peregrinations. Also, toward the end, I started thinking about large…tracts of land.
–Daniel
Migration? Not sure if this is from peregine, the bird, or pegegre, the foreigner. Maybe they’re the same thing –
A migrating bird
Travelling abroad
Mix and match?
Continuing…
After a raucous evening in Dehors where we learned from our temps of the flesh that temps lie, we found ourselves enchainement at the Grand Battement where a tremendous tour of the force finished it for us.
For crying out loud, there’s no double meanings in “peregrinations.” It just means “travels on foot.”
PAD
Hey, you were asking people to look for hidden items in the sentence. Too bad it’s right there in front of them.
How did your peregrinations allow you to enter with impunity? Is Unity a really short guy that you picked up wandering about the hinterlands?
Come to think of it, why are hinterlands hinter? Shouldn’t they be houterlands?
-Lev
I’m with Lev Bronstein on this one…
While we don’t have all the context (or geography) here, I don’t automatically understand how the simple fact of having travelled further north than previously has the consequence of being able to enter a city without penalty or endangerment.
Regardless, it’s an impressive sentence (even if I can’t discern whatever hidden joke it might contain,) and one I’m sure I’d understand better reading it in the book itself–and perhaps in a goofy, sleep-derprived mood as well.
GOT IT,I think,
Hey! You’re all overworking the poor sentence. Try reading it through very quickly, and see what kind of images come to mind.
And think DEMENTED. If you’ve read any of the Apropos novels, and keep in mind the general context of a good portion of it…you’ll get it. 🙂
Okay, the first time I read it through I had an image of a large p*nis (how family-friendly is this weblog?) in my head. Then, reading the comments, I overanalyzed it (felt kinda silly because other people seemed to think the peregrinations word was important, but I just figured it meant travels); then reading Jason’s comment, I read the sentence over again. The same image continues to rear its ugly head.
*laughs hysterically*
Yolande
I’m sure its do with a p*nis!
I’m afraid asking for conjecture on this sentence made us look too hard. I did understand it, but the seed of doubt was planted.
Sir Aprosos and the GRE Voc. review…
Were you not simply making wordplay with some very standard ballet terms? Port de bras for the movement of the arms, grand jete for large steps? Boy, I only knew port de bras because Oscar Madison was taught the exercise many years ago. Love the site, by the way.
My mind must not be dirty enough. Reading it, what came first to my mind has to do with what a new baby does with its mother at all hours of the night (and continues to do, sometimes in public, for some time after).