Heavy metal, drugs and sexual passion had dissolved her brain to a certain point where she no longer distinguished between dead and living persons. - Neal Stephenson

And Türing answered another,” Rudy said.
“Who’s that?”
“It’s me,” Alan said. “But Rudy’s joking. ‘Turing’ doesn’t really have an umlaut in it.”
“He’s going to have an umlaut in him later tonight,” Rudy said, looking at Alan in a way that, in retrospect, years later, Lawrence would understand to have been smoldering.

Sorry,” she said, “I got out as fast as I could, but I had to stay and socialize. Protocol, you know.”
“Explain protocol,” Nell said. This was how she always talked to the Primer.
“At the place we’re going, you need to watch your manners. Don’t say ‘explain this’ or ‘explain that.’”
“Would it impose on your time unduly to provide me with a concise explanation of the term protocol?” Nell said.
Again Rita made that nervous laugh and looked at Nell with an expression that looked like poorly concealed alarm.

In reenactment groups it was customary for each participant to adopt a persona, or, at a bare minimum, a nickname that wouldn't sound too jarringly anachronistic when called out in the heat of action. Corvallis had become Corvus, which was just the Latin word for “crow.” ... At first he'd been mildly uncomfortable with it.... He now saw it through a hybrid of Pacific Northwest aboriginal myths and Roman aviomancy. ... Crows, or ravens (the distinction was unclear), were set apart by their extreme intelligence, memory, and resourcefulness; but no matter how well they embodied those fine traits, no one appreciated them.