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A Font Book of Squiggles in Tristram Shandy


Laurence Sterne’s serpentine squiggle is an eloquent testament to the limitation of words. The twisting line represents a stick waving in the air to wordlessly communicate the vagaries of married life, relating a thousand syllogisms’-worth of meaning.

The twisting line represents a stick waving in the air to wordlessly communicate the vagaries of married life, relating a thousand syllogisms’-worth of meaning. Download EPS The novel “conducts an extremely interesting dialogue with silence, continually taking us to the point where language loses its power to communicate and other methods must be employed (by both the author and his characters). we recognize that we have reached the boundaries of language, as does Uncle Toby himself: ‘A thousand of my father’s most subtle syllogisms could not have said more for celibacy.”

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