[“The point, Acorn,” Jeanne continued, interrupting my didactic parenthetical edification, “is that we created you, and so we’re in a unique position to judge you for the horrible things you’ve apparently done.” “‘Apparently’?” Acorn whinnied. “So you don’t even know what you’re judging me for?” “They don’t know yet,” Dirk said. “I’m going to have to read them.” He pulled a thin, worn paperback book from his back pocket. Its cover showed a picture of a pony, and was defaced with some vulgar and hilarious text. “‘Read’ being a loaded term, of course. Vocare versus legere. Isn’t it funny that the English word doesn’t distinguish between reading silently and reading aloud? We need separate modifying words to clarify. The father phoneme and the filial grapheme reunited by ambiguity.” Minos and Betancourt were rolling their eyes as if they were desperate gamblers down to their last dollar and said eyes were their lucky pair of dice. They were rolling them pretty fucking hard, is the point. Dirk continued, undeterred. “The closest we have to a unique verb for reading aloud in English is probably “recite” — from the Latin “recitare,” which can mean either “to repeat from memory,” or “to read aloud.” But the English “recite” has almost entirely the implication of speaking from memory, not directly from a page. The mind as an intermediate step between text and mouth, words being inscribed on the surface of the brain before being spoken. That word — inscribe — is really the heart of it all, isn’t it? Scirbere, to write. Inscribe, not just to write, but to write into, to embed words in the page. To recite is to speak aloud the words written into the brain by the page. A reversal of the standard interpretation of causation. Page writing into man, the source and receiver of the violence flipped. Speaking as reading, reading as speaking; reading as writing, writing as reading. So when I say that I will ‘read’ your sins, it should be clear that I’m simultaneously reading and writing, but equally clear that there is no difference at all between those two actions.”] #DetectivePony