The language, shifts in point of view and the audacity of the novel's premise are overwhelming.
For years, brand names have become absorbed into the language, shifting from discrete proper nouns to regular common ones: Frisbee, Kleenex, Xerox, Band-aid.
Immediately after this, however, the language shifts: Hours and seconds passed, the moonlight shone on the wrong wall, there was no moonlight only darkness, and in the center of all darkness Faxe: the Weaver: a woman, a woman dressed in light.
The language shifts easily from a modern register to Alina's heightened imagining of parents who stand guard over their children: "And the fathers slept standing up, at the doors of their houses, their axes in their hands, at the ready".
Some people take great pride in their command of language, so when the language shifts, they're no longer in command of it and they become resentful.
The language shifts from surrealist to bored with itself to perverted to mystical to sentimental to Dada-like babble, all on a dime.
I worked for McDonough at the time, and while I found his vision to be inspiring, I struggled to reconcile the differences between a building that is "alive" and a building "like a tree," the language shifting back and forth between fact and metaphor, life and like life.
The system model is described as a dynamic network of hybrid automata in the programming language Shift and allows reasoning about specification and dynamical properties in a formal setting.
Two subdialects of Ottawa arise from these population movements and the subsequent language shift.
