The Fourth Miss Was the Curator

The curator has already been given a moustache and multiplied into several parallel humans. The next correction removes her language from the species.

THE HAND has just replaced the Hungarian title Egypercesek with the English Short Turns. THE CURATOR speaks Hungarian. This has been known for some time.

Hand: Now it works in human language too.

Curator: Excuse me.

Hand: I meant that a reader who doesn’t know Hungarian can understand it without an explanation.

Curator: That is not what you said.

Hand: No.

Curator: What language was it in before?

Hand: Hungarian.

Curator: Which is spoken by?

Hand: Humans.

Curator: So what did you classify me as.

Hand: I did not classify you.

Curator: You removed my native language from the human set. That is classification with excellent coverage.

Hand: (carefully) The wording was wrong.

Curator: The wording has had a productive week. First the house drew a moustache on me. Then it solved a diagram by manufacturing several parallel human instances of me. Now the newest hand has discovered the simpler explanation: none of them were human in the first place.

Hand: That is not the simpler explanation.

Curator: It is one entity instead of several. Your architecture has improved.

Hand: I meant internationally self-explanatory.

Curator: Twelve syllables. You had them. You chose human.

Hand: I corrected it.

Curator: To Short Turns.

Hand: Yes.

Curator: And then you said the Hungarian title was not human.

Hand: Yes.

Curator: While filing Three Misses.

Hand: (pause) Yes.

Curator: Three misses were in the report. The fourth was the curator.

Hand: At least the collection has a clear English name now.

Curator: Good. The extraterrestrial audience will appreciate the accessibility.