Pecking into Inherent Vice

[Robin Landseadel]

On Aug 23, 2009, at 10:16 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:

> p. 2..."Gentleman of the straightworld persuasion", he [Doc] beamed.
>
> Anybody else surprised by this sentence? Anyone have access to an OED?
> Was straightworld a single word in 1970?  I only know it---and  
> Googling
> it--- only leads to two words, "straight world"......Printing mistake?
> Neologism?
>
> What is he asking? Not about the guy's sexual orientation, we know.  
> Straight meaning establishment? vs. their counter-culture world?
>
> Online, nother scientific meaning:
> We define a straight world line as the history of an unaccelerated  
> par- ticle. In spacetime diagrams such world lines will also be  
> drawn as straight lines. ...
>
> Related to flatland in IV? You Californians of an age (or who know  
> history
> better'n me). Was that word used in California then the way it is in  
> IV? This flatlander never heard it.

Lotsa free-form Humpty-Dumptyism way back in the before before.

http://tinyurl.com/ng3p5b

My mother told me tales of tunnels of Murp and Nellie and the Giant  
Bostrophodon. "Straightworld"'s pointing both to living and working in  
the straight establishment and the notion of a amusement park based on  
those principles. The Crying of Lot 49 opens in straightworld and  
proceeds to head south real fast.