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Here is a collection of notes to various really, really obscure references and puns and other stuff in the essays that, if either of us had a life, I wouldn't be writing and you wouldn't be reading.

-Enjoy! RHB


Absinth
1.   "... presence of his own Absinth" As they say 'Absinth makes the heart grow fonder', ...or is it 'Absinth makes the brain grow blubber'?
Adulthood
"... into adulthood" or in extreme cases into adultery!
AEthelraed Unraed
"... though their version obviously ruined a rather good joke." Just in case it didn't for you---"Unræd" is a pun on the literal translation of Æthelræd's name, "noble counsel", with un-ræd, meaning "no counsel". BTW Æthelræd also appears as "EÐELRED", presumably just to be awkward---he seems to have been like that!
aggro
By abbreviation from SMoE 'aggravation' or 'aggression' with diminutive suffix -o, skinhead etc usage

1. Aggressive or violent behavior. 2. Irritation or exasperation

Americanisation
Though you should note that the Americanisation of Richard has not proceeded far enough that he would spell the word with a 'z', nor that he would call that letter anything but 'Zed'.
Anne Catherine Emmerich
"... Anne Catherine Emmerich's Visions Thing" Rather strange stuff, at least to me, Anne Catherine Emmerich seems
to have had a lot of influence on Gibson.
Armed
Armed
"... He rode all unarmed" isn't it an interesting comment on humanity how we have got to the modern and transitive 'armed and dangerous' from the old and intransitive 'armed and (therefore) safe'---as in wearing armour!
Ask
"... he axed me to come" Ask could well be the poster-child for metathesis: the sibilant whizzes round the velar plosive so fast that I'm surprised that it doesn't fly off and hit some other word in the i. The joke here (such as it is) is that the Old English form was usually acsian and that it was probably still the dominant one at the time of our tale.
Barbed-wire Canoe
"... paddle my barbed-wire canoe" This section is a play upon the humorously deprecatory phrase, if you will forgive my descent into taboo usage, and since we are all scholars inter pares here, "Up shit creek in a barbed-wire canoe with no paddle"
Binkleyphone
Not to be confused with Nonbinkleyphones! Thomas Binkley was a seminal figure in the recent history of old music. Someone on the Early Music mailing list once suggested (whilst we were discussing the difficult taxonomy of earlier musical instruments) that classifying them according to whether they were played by Binkly was as good a scheme as any, hence our dichotomy.

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