Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand - Style

Style

Stars employs many stylistic tropes that reinforce the differences between contemporary thinking and the thinking of the novel's far-future setting.

• As mentioned above, the Velm sections of the novel assign an alternate meaning to the pronouns "he" and "she" not related to physical gender. All characters, whether they are human males or females or evelm males, females, or neuters, are referred to as "she" in most contexts, and "woman" and "womankind" are used as generic terms for humans. The normally male pronouns such as "he" or "him" are used to denote sexual interest in the subject by the speaker.
• Words relating to work and occupations are subscripted (for example, job₁, job₂, job₃) to indicate whether the work involved is one's central "life's work", a different work that one still habitually performs, or an occupation taken up temporarily. Marq Dyeth is consistently called an industrial diplomat₁, as that is his job₁, but at home he works₂ as a docent₂ for visitors to his famous residence; in his youth, he worked₃ for a time as a tracer₃, a Velmian occupation tracking the flow of resources through the economy. This usage derives from Alfred Korzybski's general semantics.
• Unusual terms are used for what seem to be familiar concepts; for example, "geosector" is used consistently instead of "nation" or "country", and "nurture stream" in the Velm sections instead of "family" (when referring to the Velmian version of a family; the "Family," the galactic faction, is referred to by that term). Also, familiar terms, such as "room", "hunt," and "dinner party," refer to things very much unlike what they refer to in our world.
• Residents of Velm use five cardinal directions instead of four: north, east, south, oest, and west.
• The central sense of the evelm is taste, rather than sight, and both evelm and Velmian humans (including Marq) use many phrases and metaphors relating to taste and the tongue where English speakers would use a visual metaphor (saying something "tastes good" instead of "looks good," for example). In fact, the evelm have multiple tongues and can use them to speak multiple things simultaneously, something that is shown typographically in the novel.
• Delany makes notable use of common American colloquialisms. Examples include the phrases "baker's dozen", "fiddle" (verb form), "super-handy-dandy", and "have the dope on", to name a few. These words and phrases jar with the futuristic alien landscape of the novel, and the strange, technological vocabulary employed throughout.