Galactic Pot Healer
Philip K. Dick has a book named Galactic Pot Healer. The book is a good combination of Dick’s dry style and the weird speed-freak ramblings that I love about his writing.
As pointed out on this blog (which has a great name), the book was surprisingly prescient for its time: it predicted a thoroughly modern game that I’ve played many times where automated translating engines like Babelfish produce odd-sounding translations when you run through a cycle of English-to-Spanish, Spanish-to-Chinese, Chinese-to-Greek, Greek-to-English (for example)... and it predicted Viagra (which I am most definitely not linking to… I will not do my comment spammers any favors).
Think about this, though: doesn’t “Galactic Pot Healer” sound like an artifact of the mis-translation game? What do you think that phrase meant in its language of origin (maybe English)? I’ve been thinking about this, on and off, for a while and I’m not coming up with any answers.
Weird.