Words Change and Change Again

This sentence from The Female Man (Joanna Russ, 1975), made me pause when I came across it:

There’s no being out too late in Whileaway, or up too early, or in the wrong part of town, or unescorted.  You cannot fall out of the kinship web and become sexual prey for strangers, for there is no prey and there are no strangers — the web is world-wide.

I think Russ meant “kinship” when she refers to a “world-wide web.”  But this is one of those pleasantly puzzling cases where today’s reader will automatically impose an unintended meaning on a phrase, and it’s necessary to pause and make a deliberate attempt to reconstruct the meaning the author intended.

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