Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me!

Electricity has made angels of us all. Not angels in the Sunday school sense of being good or having wings, but spirit, freed from flesh, capable of instant transportation anywhere. The moment we pick up a phone, we're nowhere in space—everywhere in spirit. That is Saint Augustine's definition of God: a being whose center is everywhere, whose borders are nowhere. Edmund Carpenter And when the word telephone came in, the word phony followed. It means an unreal voice, something that is devoid of—of physical being. It's a spirit; it's an angel; you know, it can be anywhere and everywhere. I cannot think of any group that emphasizes individualism more than the English language. We even make first person pronoun upper case; something we reserve for, you know, editorial or for royalty and it may have been an accident of design that brought that in but it is not an accident that kept it in. In Eskimo for example, first person pronoun is rarely used, it's regarded as highly aggressive. You wouldn't say " I'm getting angry, " you'd say, " ah, this igloo may witness anger. " Or they wouldn't say, " I killed that bear, " they'd say " an old bear walked by and a harpoon chanced to embed itself in its flank. " And I think that for one thing, living in an igloo, everybody in a small area, man you better mute aggression and