How many molecules are in Avogadro’s molar?
Do you know the drill?
Was it a hard day at the orifice?
Can we just cap it?
Are you brushing us off?
Oh, spit! Canal we get to the root of the problem?
Oy! what’s e-name-l agin?
Isn’t a route canal dental care in Panama?
Suez you know anything about it?
At this juncture, I invite you all into one of the masterpieces of English, and one that us questions-only language-play types will appreciate: the Anna Livia chapter, published at first as a separate book, of Finnegans Wake.
Rather than steal one of Joyce’s plays on a river name, havalook at this list and hyperlinked index to the lines of text and commentary sorted only on the names of rivers–I forget how many hundreds he weaves through it. (Let alone the additional hundreds of words associated with bodies of water, ports, etc.) It is a tour de force of concentration within this extraordinary work. None of the puns are done without a reason within the (semi)-normal narration and the purpose/point of the double/triple entendres.
Anna Livia–the Liffey–is the anima of the book. This chapter is the dialogue of two washerwoman on either side of a brook talking and gossiping about her and everything else under the sun as they wash the clothes of Anna and her husband, so to speak, Finnegan (a choice among their many and fluid (heh) quondam identities.)
Anyway, it’s a kick.
Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur — nuk?
So… you’re asking us to Read Joyce and Be Glad?
Why don’t you put up a passage from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and say it’s Dubliners-or-nothing?
Irish I’d thought of that, don’t you?
Having a Clue, Eutychus?
Is anyone else but me getting an Éire feeling?
D’oh! Irrelevant now.
Prof. Plum, in the bedroom, with the “lead pipe”?
Have we gone off the rails?
No, but I think we’re over the rivers. Or maybe not. Can we Liffey it up to the Shannon?