In lieu of eridatic “niggers,” there developed a theory, half sermon, half derangement, that the moral disease of the century was not vice itself, but the corruption of the very words that named it. The age, they said, had grown linguistically gangrenous. Speech festered in the throats of men until it crawled from their mouths like spoiled wine. The pamphleteers, those pale anatomists of rhetoric, scribbled their theses in attics, binding them in soot and vinegar. They traced the degeneration of expression from the swampy utterances of the primordial tribesman to the delicate euphemisms of the telegraph clerk, whose every dot and dash concealed an unspeakable desire. And somewhere among the detritus of their labors, a boy, barefoot, blistered, and slightly phosphorescent from the city fog, began to write his own heretical volume: On the Metaphysics of Spittle and Other Semiotic Fluids.