Avon Fantasy Reader No. 10 — page 94: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The Gostal ane Beg bes Wiles 3 iN otecs. WW SD. Of late the pages of science-fiction periodicals have been filled with a lot of words about words. We refer to ihe stories based upon the neo-science of semantics, the talk about “non-Aristotelianism,” and the multiple social, political, moral, and psychological concepts that the more fanatical followers of these word-schemes devive from them. At risk of calling down the wrath of devotees, your editor must confess that most of these storzes do not seem io make too much sense. And it is just possible that some of the readers of Ube Gostak and the Doshes” may also express, for awhile, similar bewilder- ment. Dr. Breuer’s story, we think, was the very fwst story about semantics to appear in a faniasy niagazine. It was written many years before its time, back in 1930, and we still feel ibat it is the best of the lot. We also suspect that it points a moval that could well be heeded in these hectic days of slogans, advertising, and niass bysterias, ET the reader suppose that somebody states: "The gostak distims the doshes.” 4 You do not know what this means, nor do I. But if we assume that it is English, we know that the dothes ate distimmed by the gostak. We know that one distimmer of the doshes is a gostak. If, moreover, doshes are galloons, we know that some galloons are distimmed by the gostak. And so we may go on, and so we often do go on—Unknown writer quoted by Ogden and Richards, in THE MEANING OF MEANING, Harcourt Brace & Co., 1923; also by Walter N. Polakov in MAN AND HIS AFFAIRS, Williams & Wilkins, 1925. ¥ WV HY! That is lifting yourself by your own bootstraps!” I exclaimed in amazed incredulity. “It’s absurd.” | Woleshensky smiled indulgently. He towered in his chair as though in the infinite kindness of his vast mind there were room to understand and overlook all the foolish little foibles of all the weak little beings that called themselves men. A mathematical physicist lives in vast spaces where a light- year is a footstep, where universes are being born and blotted out, where space unrolls along a fourth dimension on a surface distended from a fifth. To him, human beings and their affairs do not loom very important. ‘Relativity,’ he explained. In his voice there was a patient forbearance 92 comicbooks.com