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Hal sneezes twice. Pemulis taps his fingers in a little anapestic gallop over the unit’s top. Orin sounds like he’s sitting up straight. ‘Hallie kid now you’re right with me, this is where your pondering lobes come in, because that was just my response, that there was nothing sufficiently more than just an annoying gnat-like annoyance about the insurgencies, which is where she moved beyond my depth back into l(a), if you remember, when she raised this samizdat-word in connec—’

a. Don’t ask.

b. Ibid.

c. I.e., the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts, a syntactic-integrity PAC Avril had put together with two or three very dear friends and colleagues around metro Boston.

d. The Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster’s anti-sclerotic miracle-food craze.

e. The then-skinny Eliot Kornspan, before Loach and Freer got hold of him.

f. At once high-tech and somehow atavistic, Telegrocery services let you order off your TP and then have the stuff brought right to your door by college-studenty types, often within hours, saving one the stress and fluorescent hassle of public food-shopping. As of Y.D.A.U. it’s still very big in some areas and not all that big in others. The first Tele-grocery service didn’t even launch in metro Boston until YY2007MRCVMETIUFI/ ITPSFH,O,OM(s), and it’s still mostly in Boston a downscale and blue-collar thing, oddly.

g. Interlace serves just about all of habitable O.N.A.N.; each nation comprises (roughly speaking) an entertainment-dissemination ‘Grid.’

h. After Meech Lake I, Charlottetown I and II, and Meech Lake II, this was Ottawa’s fifth and final attempt to placate Quebec with a constitutional amendment formalizing the Gallic province’s right to ‘preserve and promote’ a ‘distinct society and culture.’

i. The French and Indian War, known to Québecers as ‘La Guerre des Britanniques et des Sauvages,’ BS c. 1754-60, at the final battles of which, at the Plains of Abraham in ‘59 and Montreal in ‘60, the English and Americans kicked ass and took names in a large way that’s never quite been forgotten by the Québecois, whose memory for insult is the stuff of legend. The wily Amherst was there, too, at Ticonderoga and Montreal, with his trusty smallpox-blankets.

j. Grammar and Meaning.

k. The Clean U.S. Party of Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner.

1. The Calgarian pro-Canadian Phalanx.

[111] Hal’s term, actually an Incandenza-family term, actually not inappropriate here because like most Incandenza-family terms put into family usage by Avril, who’s an expatriate Québecer, whinge is some east-Canadian idiom for vigorous high-pitched complaining, almost like whining except with a semantic tinge of legitimacy to the complaint.