Word: sapient
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...humans and animals can be one long semantic rabbit hole down which any curious Alice can easily lose her orientation. Definitions of language differ among physiologists, behaviorists, linguists and philosophers, with the gloomy Ludwig Wittgenstein once suggesting that even if a lion could talk, we would not understand it. Sapient quadrupeds and "talking" lesser primates could also challenge a sacred precept of Western culture: that man is superior to nature...
...when Donoso starts pulling his fanciful strings, a model named Sylvia is revealed as a sapient dummy whose arms can be popped from their sockets and whose features can be wiped away. To her lover, Anselmo, Sylvia is an ideal of female submissiveness. But Sylvia has a trick up her armless sleeve. A subtle application of vanishing cream causes Anselmo's sex to disappear-just before his return home to his wife...