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Understanding McLuhan
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Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso
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08535_Field_TCGG T300.txt
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1996-04-10
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language seems scarcely to alter from generation to
generation. Boys continue to crack jokes that Swift
collected from his friends in Queen Anne’s time; they play
tricks which lads used to play on each other in the heyday
of Beau Brummel; they ask riddles which were posed when
Henry VIII was a boy. Young girls continue to perform a
magic feat (levitation) of which Pepys heard tell (‘One of
the strangest things I ever heard’): they hoard bus tickets
and milk-bottle tops in distant memory of a love-lorn girl
held to ransom by a tyrannical father; they learn to cure
warts (and are successful in curing them) after the
manner which Francis Bacon learnt when he was young.
They call after the tearful the same jeer Charles Lamb
recollected: they cry ‘Halves!’ for something found as
Stuart children were accustomed to do; and they rebuke
one of their number who seeks back a gift with a couplet