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A Partial History of Attempts to Construct Interstellar Transport Using Small Pieces of Recycled Paper

The teacher spoke.  No one had a tape recorder handy or seemed to know shorthand.  
 
He used our words instead of his, adapting a little of what he saw we could grasp.  
 
Of the part we heard, we recalled a portion.   In time, we came to understand, vaguely, a part of what our memory seemed to say.  
 
Of that portion, we wrote and spoke a little, and part of that was moved to other languages by strangers with their own political agendas.  
 
We heard, or thought we did–had we been women, we would have heard differently but at the time it didn't occur to us.  
 
No one in the chain thought much about the anomalies of retro-cognition, or vicissitudes of linguistic obscurations.