Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: The Cosmic Library
Episode: 1.4 Finnegan and Friends: Familiar Language
Description: Think of your most obscure, private, family chatter—some combination of baby-talk and nicknames and reiterations of the same concerns or jokes. It wouldn’t make sense to outsiders, but it makes a special kind of sense to you. It’s language that communicates in a highly local way, and not at all in other ways. And yet: everyone sort of knows how this language works. In Finnegans Wake, that private language converges, even, with broadly recognizable mythic language. We’re reading about a family—the patriarch HCE, the mother ALP, the sons Shem and Shaun, and daughter Issy—but they’re...