the problem of communication—often saying, for example, that it was almost a miracle when any two people actually communicated. He gained increased respect for the occult power of words, recognizing, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, that each word was a “fossil poem”—it had a long history of usage, with a trail of meanings, each one of which tended to cast a spell, whenever the word was used, on the speaker and listener, reader and writer. He particularly loved puns, because they revealed the ambiguity and richness of words.

McLuhan was perpetually looking up words in the Oxford English Dictionary, savoring their etymology. When he read a book such as Joyce’s Finnegans Wake , he immediately recognized a soul-mate. Joyce, too, loved puns and believed that the archaic meanings of words were never