It started as a joke about scorekeeping and turned into a study of how
forty-odd cultures each name the same silence.
The meter is satire. The localisation is not: every locale is written
from inside its own culture rather than translated, and the lowest zone in
each one had to be that language's own word for going quiet at someone you
love — tampo, inat, muso lungo, de morros, ኩርፊያ, だんまり, 唔瞅唔睬,
boudé, sullin'. None of them borrowed it.
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