The DNA of language can also go awry

when ‘smoking’ (pronounced ‘esmoquin’) becomes Spanish for ‘tuxedo’. Even more bizarre is the meaning it takes under the watchful eyes of Bangkok courtesans, probably because the word pronounced ‘soop’ also means ‘to suck’ as well as ‘to smoke’, and the rest is history. I heard white punks use the same term the same way a few days ago in a movie. Don’t think about this while eating your morning gruel. To talk about the DNA of culture is to acknowledge possibly more than just the similarities between the evolutions of Nature and culture, but also the unity, the interlocking connection between the two, culture presumably a plethora of Nature’s little experiments, little whirling eddies, off the main flow. As such, might there not be a common uniting factor, such as memory, which propels both?

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