Book 1, Finnegan's Wake : Chapter 6, Part 2 Cont. Summary

There is a decipherable joke word used on page 289. Readers may or may not know that there was a massive and far-reaching sociological project to standardize the spelling of words. This was done to make books and writing accessible to a wider audience. This distorted the capacity to use phonetics as the one right way to figure out how to spell a word. The reason for this are variances in pronunciation. James Joyce seems to be making a joke about this yet again when he writes, "medeoturanian" (p. 289). Most people can tell he means the Mediterranean Sea. His phonetics are near perfect but the spelling, from a standardized perspective, is lousy. Here we see that the author is resorting to 18th century behavior in the 20th century, and somehow he is getting away...