Word: earwig
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...really have to follow the Ear if you want to be a real "Earwig." The first Ear can be incomprehensible, but with practice readers catch her tricks. When she goes wok shopping, that means someone is getting married. You notice the artful thread running through each tidbit in a day's column as if it were all somehow related. And you begin to get an idea who Uncle Oscar is. Now you're ready to quote Ear over your own personal gossip fence. Everybody else does it, after...
...sleep." He is a pubkeeper named Porter, but his Freudian alias in the dream is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Why Earwicker? Well, Porter's night life is invaded by an incestuous passion for his daughter Isobel (Iseult-Isolde). The inadmissible word "incest" sneaks by as "insect," specifically "earwig." Thus the odd name, says Burgess, is "dreamily appropriate...
...sexual guilt he carries on his back (he is a different porter now), a hint of the ape, and more than a hint of the insect." To the straightforward reader, it may appear that the explanation only compounds the problem, especially when Burgess points out that the French for "earwig" is perce-oreille, which "can be Hibernicized into Persse O'Reilly," a name appropriate to H. C. Earwicker's dream career as an Irish patriot. His initials also mean "Here Comes Everybody" (turning the sleeper into Everyman) and "Haveth Childers Everywhere" (making him Adam, father of all living...
...court is this? It sits in a dingy old loft. Its "lawbooks" are filled with pornographic pictures. The examining magistrate gets K.'s case all mixed up with the case of a house painter. To conduct his defense, K. retains an advocate (Orson Welles). But while the old earwig is mumbling about legal problems, K. sneaks off with his chambermaid (Romy Schneider), a sexy witch with webbed fingers who takes him for a tumble in a pile of old legal papers...
...mother was an earwig...