mercurial and Promethean. They do not fit into existing “families,” however defined. Their raison d’ítre is the maintenance of difference, the conscious preservation of the self and thus of strangeness. They are special secret languages in the service of Mercury’s precarious artistry. For example, the argot of German Jewish cattle traders (like that of the rabbis) contained a much higher proportion of Hebrew words than the speech of their kinsmen whose communication needs were less esoteric. With considerable insight as well as irony, they called it Loshen-Koudesh , or “sacred language” / “cow language,” and used it, as a kind of Yiddish in miniature, across large territories. (Beyond the Jewish world, Yiddish was, along with Romani, a major source of European underworld vocabularies.) 25 But mostly it was religion, which is to say “culture,” which is to say service nomadism writ large, that made Mercurian languages special. As Max Weinreich put it, “ ‘Ours differs from theirs’ reaches much further than mere disgust words or distinction words.” Or rather, it was not just the filthy and the sublime that uncleansed “Gentile” words could not be allowed to express; it was charity, family, childbirth, death, and indeed most of life. One Sabbath benediction begins with “He who distinguishes between the sacred and the profane” and ends with “He who distinguishes between the sacred and the sacred.” Within the Jewish—and Gypsy—world, “all nooks of life are sacred, some more, some less,” and so secret words multiplied and metamorphosed, until the language itself became secret, like the people it served and celebrated. 26 In addition to more or less secret vernaculars, some service nomads possess formally sacred languages and alphabets that preserve their scriptural connection to their gods, past, home, and salvation (Hebrew and Aramaic for the Jews, Avestan and Pahlavi for the Parsis, Grabar for the Armenians, Syriac for the Nestorians). Indeed, all literate service nomads (including the Overseas Chinese and Eastern European Germans, for example) can be said to possess such languages, for all modern “national” languages are sacred to the extent that they preserve their speakers’ connection to their (new) gods, past, home, and salvation. All Mercurians are multilingual, in other words (Hermes was the god of eloquence). As professional internal strangers equally dependent on cultural difference and economic interdependence, they speak at least one internal language (sacred, secret, or both) and at least one external one. They are all trained linguists, negotiators, translators, and mystifiers, and the literate groups among them tend to be much more literate than their hosts—because literacy,