Talk:Qwghlm

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Why on Earth is there a link to a Congolese pleiosaur? If it can be justified, great...but I'll be tempted to delete it in a few days.--Polyparadigm 20:51, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)

"It is somewhat of a parody of Ireland and Northern Ireland, and their mutual dislike for the others' way of life and religion."--I don't believe this comparison holds up at all. Inner and Outer Qwghlm are not two halves of a nation divided in two by a tragic history, they are simply two geographical parts of the same entity, both part of the same Union, possessing a certain sibling rivalry. You might as well compare the Inner/Outer Qwghlm rivalry to the North Devon/South Devon rivalry in "Westward Ho!". It'd be silly, but it would be more accurate. I think, if we had to pin down exactly what the joke is here, we can only say that Stephenson is lampooning a tendency of people, especially in out-of-the-way parts of the world, to care a lot about microscopic parochial divisions that mean next to nothing to outsiders. Based on the description of Qwghlm, with its Runic alphabet, its isolation and small size, its rockyness and its specific non-Celticness, I often thought of Orkney or the Shetlands, or even the Isle of Man, but never Ireland.

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Is there an encyclopedic way to mention that the name Qwghlm is made of two-letter pairs on a normal QWERTY keyboard? --AnotherDoth 18:42, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

Considering that the name is in fact not made of two-letter pairs, there's probably no encyclopedic way to say that it is....

On a standard QWERTY keyboard, L and M are on different rows, and not even diagonally adjacent; they're separated by a "knight's move." --76.205.215.155 (talk) 11:33, 16 January 2008 (UTC)