The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...

Webster's First New intergalactic WICKEDARY of the English Language

Conjured by Mary Daly in cahoots with Jane Caputi

With an Experimental Webbing by Alexiares

APPENDICULAR WEB TWO

Be-Laughing:
Nixing, Hexing, and X-ing

Be-Laughing women see snools as fools and Denounce them as such. Such Denouncing is not mere "fooling around." It is Pronouncing snoolish stupidity to be blameworthy and evil. It punctures the pomposity of wantwits and windbags whose malignant mindlessness would destroy the world. Moreover, Be-Laughing is an expression of Elemental humor, carrying Lusty Leapers/Laughers into the Background. It is ontological laughing.

Be-Laughing Searchers are intrigued with the etymology of the word fool. It is derived from the Middle English fol, from the Old French fol, from the Latin follis, meaning "bellows, windbag" (American Heritage). Follis is akin to the Greek phallos, meaning "penis," and the Sanskrit bhānda, meaning "pot." The basic sense, is "to swell" (Webster's).[1]

...

As Self-conscious Seers, Be-Laughing women are engaged in the Metamysterious work of Metafooling. Disdaining the fooling of snools, we learn to See and Act in ways that transcend the rules of fools. Refusing Fool-fillment, we escape the state of totaled women. Refuting the foolproofs of foolosophical re-search, we avoid absorption by academentia. In short, Metafooling is Outrageous Contagious Departure from phallic fixations. It consists of riotous transformations.

The Metafooling herein described is threefold: First there is Nixing. Next there is Hexing. Third, there is X-ing. These are intertwined, interwoven wondrous workings/wordings that are Dis-covered and passed on among Silly Shrews and Gossips and Other Weirdward Intergalactic Galloping Nag-Gnostic Voyagers.

Nixing

According to Webster's, the verb nix means "VETO, FORBID, PROHIBIT, BAN, REJECT, CANCEL." Nixes veto, forbid, and ban the boring behavior of snools, portending the end of snooldom. Thus Nixing means Denouncing the drooling of fools, the droning of clones, the mindless devastations wrought by Stag-nations.

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Hexing

The verb hex is said to mean "to practice witchcraft upon: put a hex on" (Webster's). Be-Witching women practice Hexing, casting Spells. The Hexing of Be-Laughing Witches does not deceive/delude. Rather, it unmasks the mysterious masters, undoes the dupers, the deadly dudes, Pronouncing the Doom of doomdom.

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X-ing

X is the symbol for the Unknown and Variable Qualities of Questing women. X-ing is a metaphoric way of Naming the Contrariwise Qualitative Leaps of such women and of foretelling the emergence of the X-factor among Weirdward Journeyers. It is also a way of Announcing the convergence of conditions for cosmic encounters and for receiving Be-Tidings. The X-ing of Metafooling Muses can be considered under several aspects.

...

AUTHOR'S IN-TEXT FOOTNOTES

[*] The application of the word buffoonery here to the activities of phallocratic fools requires clarification. If Webster's is right, buffoon is derived from the Latin bufo, meaning "toad." All Websters recognize that any resemblance of bore-ocracy's buffoons to Elemental Toads is purely elementary.

[*] On December 18, 1985 the Vatican announced that catholics who would follow the pope's annual christmas benediction on television or radio could partake for te hfirst time in the plenary indulgence reserved until now for those who were physically present at the service. According to an article in the New York Times (December 19, 1985, p. A8): "in a single-page decree in Latin signed by Luigi Cardinal Dadaglio... the Vatican said improvements in electronic technology made the change possible."

[*] The most terrible of Gorgon figures is Medusa, whose Furious Look turned men to stone and from whose head swirled hundreds of snakes. Stories of Medusa and other Gorgons go back to Africa. See Helen Diner, Mothers and Amazons, ed. and trans. by John Philip Lundin (New York: The Julian Press, Inc., 1965), pp. 120-40. Emily Culpepper has written that the Amazon Gorgon face is Female Fury personified. She depicts her personal experience of being attacked by a man who pushed his way into her home and of the "emergence of my will to fight, my Gorgon spirit." She describes the moment of conflict, as recorded in her journal: "NOW! PUSH his body BACK! KNOCK his hand AWAY! Shove and – loud – yell, 'GET OUT! GET OUT! GET OUT!' I am staring him out, pushing with my eyes too. My face is bursting, contorting with terrible teeth, flaming breath, erupting into ridges and contours of rage, hair hissing. It is over in a flash. I still see his eyes, stunned, wide and staring, almost quizzically, at me, as if I am acting strange, as if I were acting wrong! As soon as I realize I've succeeded in shoving him outside onto the porch, I slam the door." See Emily Erwin Culpepper, "Ancient Gorgons: A Face for Contemporary Women's Rage," Woman of Power, Issue Three (Winter/Spring 1986), pp. 22-24, 40. This article is an excerpt from Culpepper's forthcoming book, Revolt of the Symbols.

[†] American media coverage of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger on January 28, 1986 (together with the lengthy and elaborate pre-launch publicity), was a stunning example of the manufacture and manipulation of pseudopresence, laying the groundwork for the fabrication of pseudomemory (elementary memory) and pseudopassions. A front-page article in the New York Times stated: "It seemed to be one of those scenes, enlarged and frozen, that people would remember and recount for the rest of their lives – what they were doing and where they were when they heard the space shuttle Challenger had exploded. The need to reach out, to speak of disbelief and pain, was everywhere." (Sara Rimer, "Afterward, a Need to Reach Out and Share Grief," New York Times, January 29, 1986, p. 1.) There was no acknowledgement in the media (of course) of the implausibility of the "grief" and "pain" attributed by the media to millions around the globe over the deaths of seven americans in a space shuttle.

The displacement of attention and emotion away from massive tragedies – world famine, oil spills, pesticide contamination, the cancer plague – is made possible by planned substitution of pseudopresence for Real Presence. Viewers were conditioned by television – the extension of "vision" – to feel that Christa McAuliffe and the astronauts were "real" and really present to them in ways that the nameless millions dying of starvation in Africa and throughout the world could never be. The manufactured "presence," which made possible controlled and misdirected release of emotion and subsequent re-turn to the normal nuclear state of psychic numbing, was a manipulation of the masses comparable to the "Two Minutes of Hate" required of the citizens of Ingsoc in George Orwell's 1984.

AUTHOR'S FOOTNOTES

[1]. Information concerning the etymological connection between follis and phallos is not given in Webster's at fool, but it is clearly revealed in the etymological history at blow. Only persistent Searches will uncover this stunning connection.

[2]. Modern examples of such authority-legitimating fools are Bob Hope, Johnny Carson, Eddie Murphy, Carroll O'Connor as Archie Bunker (All In the Family).

[3]. In recent years the faces of somber snools and "funny" fools have shown a tendency to merge – to display publicly their heretofore hidden identity. The image of Ronald Reagan is an illustrious example of the blatant blending of the two roles. One of the most ominous indications of psychic numbing in the United States in the 1980s is the fact that Reagan's flagrant foolishness was flaunted before the public for years before being noticed by the majority. Indeed, for a considerable period of time the increase of his popularity appeared to keep pace with the mounting evidence of his ineffable foolishness.

[4]. Anton C. Zijderveld, Reality in a Looking-Glass: Rationality Through an Analysis of Traditional Folly (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), p. 33.

[5]. Ibid., p. 33.

[6]. See Daly, Pure Lust, pp. 243-53.

[7]. See Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1938; Harbinger Books, 1966), p. 52. The need for what Woolf Named "freedom from unreal loyalties" has been known by women all over the world. One scholar describes the problem that this poses for ethnographers: "Ethnographers report that women cannot be reached so easily as men: they giggle when young, snort when old, reject the question, laugh at the topic, and the like. The male members of a society frequently see the ethnographer's difficulties as simply a caricature of their own daily case." See Edwin Ardener, "Belief and the Problem of Women," in The Interpretation of Ritual: Essays in Honour of A.I. Richards, ed. by Jean Sibyl La Fontaine (London: Tavistock Publications, 1972), p. 137.

[8]. Hans Peter Duerr, Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary Between Wilderness and Civilization, trans, by Felicitas Goodman (New York: Basil Blackwell, Inc., 1985), p. 46.

[9]. Ibid., p. 47.

[10]. Barbara Walker points out that in folk tradition, to open the door of a fairy hill, one must walk around it three times widdershins. See Barbara G. Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983), p. 1076. See also Rossell Hope Robbins, The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology (1959; New York: Bonanza Books, 1981), pp. 421-22.

[11]. Cited in Duerr, Dreamtime, p. 248, n. 29. See also Margaret A. Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1921), pp. 124, 135.

[12]. At a seminar held by feminists in Washington, D.C., in 1969, a "futurist" who presented himself as an affiliate of a think tank authorized by President Nixon addressed the group. He told the group that, by the most "optimistic" calculations, the "X-factor" might survive in human society for another twenty years. By "X-factor," he said, he meant something like what is commonly called "free will" and/or "spirit." As this book goes to press, eighteen years have elapsed since the "optimistic" futurist's prediction.

[13]. Connections between convergence and divergence are discussed in Daly, Beyond God the Father, pp. 190-91.

[14]. In ancient Greece, statues of Hecate, Goddess of the Witches, were built at the crossing of three roads with faces turned in three directions. In the Middle Ages, crossroads, specifically the places where three roads converged, were believed to ve loci of preternatural visions and happenings. Trivia, derived from the latin trivium (crossroads) was one of the names of the Triple Goddess.