Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Notes on "The Pointer Pointing"

It seems that someone has confounded cooking and sewing. In English languages these two arts are clearly dissimilar. But in Spanish spelling the distinction can be more easily blurred. You see, cocer sounds exactly like coser, the lone 'c' in cocer having an 's' sound because it is between two vowels and not at the beginning of a word or preceding a consonant. The English cook is unmistakably 'k' sounding, but in Spanish there is no 'k' sound in either cosimiento or cocimiento. In the ancient manuscript of The Pointer we see that he consistently uses the word cosimiento, and yet in the context of indigo making clearly the Pointer is standing over a cauldron of water watching the colors change as the simmering process progresses over some type of fire or heating device, thus supporting the spelling of cocimiento. But this is not a matter of Koki's cooking, 'Koki' Pineda being a high school classmate of ours. Someone is possibly waiting for someone to use that. No, indigo belongs to the world of dyes and fabrics and ultimately the sewer will manipulate the colors in a finished garment or other needlework. So the author slips in the word cosimiento, whether deliberately or inadvertently I cannot say. So maybe I get it and maybe I don't. Anyway, answering some of these questions is just not that important.