Dragaera

SPOILER for _Dragon_...what's up with Vlad, again?

Natarajan Krishnaswami nxk3 at po.cwru.edu
Mon Feb 17 22:11:10 PST 2003

On Mon, Feb 17, 2003 at 10:09:23PM -0800, Steven Brust wrote:
> An artifact of the typewriter.  Words or phrases "struck out" with a slash 
> so they could still be read, the humor coming from the idea that the author 
> had first written something and then changed his mind, but you could see 
> his original thought.
> 
> "You'll be at Westercon?  Great! I look forward to s/e/d/u/c/i/n/g/ meeting 
> you."

Aha, gotcha.  In my (unix geek :-) circles, we typically use "^W" (the
default value of the 'werase' (word erase) terminal control character)
to indicate this:

"You'll be at Westercon?  Great! I look forward to seducing^Wmeeting
you."

Another (bad) habit is using "sed" expressions to indicate changes to
text:

  > I think that's really clever.

  s/clever/misguided/

I.e., replace "clever" with "misguided"; this is about equivalent to
"I think you misspelled 'misguided'.".


Thanks for the clarification,
N.