Remunity

My parents are having work done at their home and need to have some piping reworked under the driveway. My father knows the guy who is going to do the work, and we were all chatting, and we got on to talking about Led Zeppelin, and a recent show he heard on Howard Stern. I've long been familiar with some of these histories, but I gave the show a listen, and I decided to look into it a little bit more, for the sake of it.

Apparently, Jake Holmes, from whom Zeppelin got Dazed And Confused, sent the band a letter reading:

I understand it's a collaborative effort, but I think you should give me some credit at least and some remunity. [emphasis mine]

What is REMUNITY? I couldn't find it in any dictionary, even the OED. Obviously, it is supposed to eb the same thing as remuneration, from the context, but there's still something fishy. Google gives me 20 hits for "remunity", when you go through them. Of the 20, they break down as follows: 8 are the previous quote. 5 pair the word closely with communion and community. It looks like those pieces have to do with the works of Jacques Derrida. I don't know if he coined the term, or the expression of the two together or what, but he's an interesting common link. I guess Holmes must've read Derrida (or had a friend who read Derrida), becaue there doesn't seem to be much trace of the word existing anywhere else.

For those who are curious about the other occurrences, one was an icelandic page that seemed to want to use the word "immunity," one was a site that indexed tons of expired domains, one was part of a user's blog name with no other context, one page did not actually have remunity on the page or in the cache, and another required a subscription to see the page. If you've been counting carefully, you'll notice that is only 18 pages. One had the word, but I could not establish the context because the page seemed to be malfunctioning, and the source did not elucidate this. As near as I can tell, it occured in a sentence all by itself in some periodical of sorts.

My personal favorite is the last one, which is from Google Books, specifically The Parliamentary Debates from the Year 1803 to the Present Time listed as by Great Britain Parliament, Thomas Curson Hansard. I was worried that my theory would crack with this attestation, but I was relieved when I read the sentence. It came out as:

Public estimation is equally the re-

-munity whilst they are wholly inadequate |

It was seperated by a break, and I quickly realized seeing the line running down the middle of the page, that the book was published with two columns per page. Google Books doesn't seem to be able to figure out that the words are actually re-(ward) and (com)-munity. An interesting little quirk. It also works for stings. Search for "tbe tional," for the same text, and you get the same kind of thing, second result, illustrating yet another weakness of this automation. Still, it's quite impressive technology.