I had the sound, “quark.” But it could have been spelled differently. For example, k-w-o-r-k or something like that. I thought it was a nice sound. And it didn’t mean anything, I thought, and that was good because when we give fancy Greek names to things — and of course, I can do that — but when we give fancy Greek names to things, it usually turns out that what they mean later is not so appropriate as what we thought at first. The proton, for example. “The first thing,” it means. Fundamental. And it turns out it’s not fundamental. So, the name proton is very learned, but it turned out not to be apt. Now “quark,” if it didn’t mean anything at all, was not going to be obsolete, ever. Anyhow, that was fine. That was the sound. But then, leafing through James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, as I sometimes do — it’s a copy my brother bought, actually, when it first came out in the United States in 1939 — and leafing through it, I saw the phrase, “Three quarks for Muster Mark.” And I thought that would be very good. So I spelled it q-u-a-r-k. Now, Joyce undoubtedly meant it to be pronounced “kwark,” to go with bark, and hark, and mark and so on. But I figured out a rationale for pronouncing it “quark,” which is that in “Three quarks for Muster Mark” — of course there is multiple determination of the word, as in many other cases of Finnegans Wake. And what I figured was that one source out of the multiple — of the many determinants of the word — one source was perhaps the fact that the dreamer, whose dream the book is, is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, who is a bar man, a publican, he owns a bar. And frequently, through the book, you hear people giving orders for drinks at the bar, drinks to take away, and so on. So one of the determinants of “three quarks for Muster Mark” could be “three quarts” for so-and-so. An order to the bar. And I still think that may be true, although there are many other, more important factors that have gone into the phrase. Anyway, that allowed me to interpret that maybe it was pronounced “kwork” instead of “kwark.” But the commentators on Finnegans Wake think that — and I think, correctly — that the main thing that it refers to is “three cries of the four gulls” that are following the ship on which Tristan and Iseult are traveling. They’re making fun of King Mark, because Tristan and Iseult are having a love affair. Those four gulls occur throughout the book, as four evangelists, four old men in the park, and so on and so forth. Four commentators of various kinds, and in this case they’re four gulls following this ship. “Quark” is listed in the dictionary as the cry of a gull. So it’s undoubtedly the primary determinant, but maybe “three quarts for so-and-so” has a slight connection with it as well. That would justify pronouncing it “kwork” instead of “kwark.”