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The man who got on at Ealing
The
man
who
got on at Ealing
talks
to strangers. He says
Meaning
is
a function of a
discourse situation.
The
leg of his spectacles
is
held in place with Sellotape.
He
knew a
mathematician called
Reifenberg,
or was it
Reisenberg?
The name
was
lost in the
tunnel's
din;
in any case
he's
dead now, poor chap,
fell
off a
mountain in the Dolomites,
but
he could drop his prejudices
instantly,
like the man who got on at Ealing
seeking
a
mathematical foundation
for
language, his manuscript
sitting
in a stranger's lap,
about
to drop a
bombshell
on an unsuspecting world
when the man
A more or less factual account of an encounter observed on the Central Line in August 1982.
© Godfrey Rust 1982, godfrey@wordsout.co.uk. See here for permissions.