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sufficiently important to deserve its own name.
    You can do ordinary lexical encoding systematiclly—for example, you could look at the words of an existing language and decide that you wanted counterparts for them in one of your native languages. Then it’s just a matter of arranging sounds that are permitted and meaningful in that language to make the counterparts. But there is no way at all to search systematically for capital-E Encodings. They come to you out of nowhere and you realize that you have always needed them; but you can’t go looking for them, and they don’t turn up as concrete entities neatly marked off for you and flashing NAME ME. They are therefore very precious.
    (Chornyak Barren House,
    Manual for Beginners , page 71)
    WINTER 2179....
    Aquina Chornyak was bored. It was a boring negotiation, on a boring contract, for a boring treaty amendment, with a set of almost stupefyingly boring Aliens-in-Transit. You never expected an A.I.T. to be exactly stimulating company—that wasn’t what they were on Earth for, in the first place, and there was no reason to anticipate that what a Terran found stimulating would be anything they found stimulating, or vice versa, in the second place—but sometimes there were a few glimmers of interest in the waste of bureaucratic drivel.
    Not this time. The Jeelods were so nearly Terran in physical appearance that it was hard to remember they were A.I.T.s . . . no amusing tentacles or tails, no pointy ears, no twin noses. Not even an exotic mode of dress to provide diversion. They were short and they were stocky, a bit more square than was typical with Earth humanoids, and they had long beards. And that was it. In their baggy coveralls they looked like a trio of . . . oh, maybe plumbers. Something of the kind. It was boring. And who cared (except the Jeelods, of course, since if they hadn’t cared they wouldn’t have demanded the negotiation), who cared if the containers Terra shipped them weapons in were blue or not?
    They cared. They’d made that clear. Blue, they had said, was a color shocking to every Jeelod, an insult to the honor of every Jeelod; it was a twx’twxqtldx matter. Aquina could not begin to pronounce that, but she hadn’t had to; she was here only as backup and social translator for Nazareth, who was the native speaker of REM34-5-720 for Earth. Nazareth could say it, as easily as she might have said “twaddle.” And Nazareth had tried patiently to explain what the word meant.
    If Aquina understood it correctly herself, making those shipping containers blue was about equivalent to the Jeelods having shipped freight to Earth in containers smeared with human feces . . . curious how the same idiot taboos turned up in so many humanoids from all over the universe. But the Jeelods weren’t going to participate in handling the matter the way two Earth cultures would have done it, in a similar situation.
    “You mean making the containers blue is like smearing shit all over them?”
    “Damn right!”
    “Jeez, we didn’t know. Our apologies, okay? What’s a color that’s okay with you guys?”
    “Make ’em red.”
    “You’ve got it.”
    And the meeting would be over. No . . . there was clearly something else going on here, and it couldn’t be done that way. (And to be honest, there were Earth cultures that couldn’t have done it that way either.)
    Every time Nazareth tried to explain it, speaking first in flawless REM34-5-720 to the Jeelods, and then in flawless English to the representatives of the U.S. Government, the same thing happened. The Jeelods went pale, turned their backs, sat down on the floor, and covered their heads with their hands—a position, Nazareth said, indicating that they were not present in any legal sense of the word. These periods of legal absence lasted, per Jeelod cultural imperatives, exactly eighteen minutes and eleven seconds. After which they would seat themselves at the conference table again and Nazareth would