QUERY: This one's gonna be fun...

[Gregory {Greg} Downing]

At 09:42 AM 5/26/2000 -0400, you wrote:
>"Fingering" (feeling underneath the clothes?),

Perhaps touching, with the fingers, the partner's actual genitals, i.e.,
everything up to and including mutual masturbation....

(Hey, *I* didn't choose this topic. Do a Barry and blame William Safire! --
Apologies to both BP and WS, I couldn't resist...!)

By the way, does WS's assistant know anything about the William Safire
collection of books on language study at Syracuse? -- his alma mater, I've
been assuming, perhaps inaccurately. Anyway, over the past two or three
years I've ended up seeing, via interlibrary loan, several late-19th and
early-20th cent. books about language from the WS collection (there are
bookplates in the front of all volumes) as part of my research for _Universe
of Discourse_, a now -- if the gods are willing -- almost completed book on
the sources of James Joyce's mature work in a whole range of ideas about
language that were current from the 1850's through the 1910's. Yes, one
would have thought that someone had already written such a book, but taint
so -- other topics have apparently sopped up all available writerly energies.




Greg Downing/NYU, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at is2.nyu.edu