Today the opening page of a fun novel described as a “nerdy, dystopic, sportively Hegelian, thriller.” As if that didn’t push enough buttons, the plot involves the death of print, a word-flu, secret societies and musings on technology and reading. It’s not Borges, but it ain’t bad. The excerpt’s a bit longer than usual, but it’s Saturday. And you can always scroll, baby, scroll.

WORK

On a very cold and lonely Friday last November, my father disappeared from the Dictionary. And not only from the big glass building on Broadway where its offices were housed. On that night my father, Douglas Samuel Johnson, Chief Editor of the North American Dictionary of the English Language, slipped from the actual artifact he’d helped compose.

That was before the Dictionary died, letters expiring on the page. Before the virus. Before our language dissolved like so much melting snow. It was before I nearly lost everything I love. Words, I’ve come to learn, are pulleys through time. Portals into other minds. Without words, what remains? Indecipherable customs. Strange rites. Blighted hearts. Without words, we’re history’s orphans. Our lives and thoughts erased.

Before my father vanished, before the first signs of S0111 arrived, I’d reflected very little on our way of life. The changing world I’d come of age in—slowly bereft of books and love letters, photographs and maps, takeout menus, timetables, liner notes, and diaries—was a world I’d come to accept. If I was missing out on things, they were things I didn’t think to miss. How could we miss words? We were drowning in a sea of text. A new one arrived, chiming, every minute.

All my life my father mourned the death of thank-you notes and penmanship. The newspaper. Libraries. Archives. Stamps. He even came to miss the mobile phones he’d been so slow to accept. And of course he also grieved the loss of dictionaries as they went out of print. I could understand his nostalgia for these things. The aesthetics of an old Olivetti. A letter opener. A quill pen. But I’d dismissed him when he’d spoken darkly of vague “consequences” and the dangers of the Meme. When he’d lectured on “accelerated obsolescence” and “ouroboros” and foretold the end of civilization. For years, as he predicted so much of what eventually came to happen—the attenuation of memory; the ascendance of the Word Exchange; later, the language virus—no one listened. Not the government, or the media, or the publishing industry. Not my mother, who grew very tired of these plaints. Not me, even after I went to work for him when I was twenty-three. No one worried about the bends we might get from progress; we just let ourselves fly higher up.

Well—not quite no one. I later learned that my father had conspirators. Those who shared his rare beliefs. But I didn’t find them until after the night he departed. Or, in fact, they sort of found me.

—Alena Graedon
—from The Word Exchange

WORD(S)

guttle. verb. To devour greedily; to consume gluttonously; to swallow over-enthusiastically; to gormandize. Derived from gut (belly); possibly influenced by guzzle. See also, partially related: guddle, which is synonymous but also means to grope for fish in a stream with one’s hands. See also part two: the delightful adjectival combination gutguddler.

“Cleopatra’s page guttling the figs in the basket which had brought the asp.” (William Thackeray)

“Of the company were two eminent gastronomes—call them Messrs. Guttle and Swig—who so acridly hated each other that nothing but a good dinner could bring them under the same roof.” (Ambrose Bierce)

“To cram my guts with tart and custard,
And goose with apple-sauce and mustard,
Or guttle down six pound of turtle,
And drink the glorious and immortal:
In joy thus eat, or fast in sorrow,
As I shall drub the rogues to-morrow!” (Tomas Bridges)

“I heard auntie talk about the soldiers come and make them cook up everything they had and et it up faster ’en it took ’er to fix it ready for ’em to guttle down.” (Minnie Hollomon)

“‘That is it now,’ quoth Sancho, ‘that makes me some times ready to run mad, Mr. Bachelor, for my master makes no more to set upon an hundred armed men than a young hungry tailor to guttle down half a dozen of cucumbers. Surely, Mr. Bachelor, there is a time to retreat as well as a time to advance…’” (Miguel de Cervantes)

WEB

1. Put down the cameras. Drop the guidebooks. Stop being a tourist (an ode to the loss of serendipity)…and diatribe.

2. Alexis Madrigal explains why “Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet”. Newsletters being one good reason!

3. How Objects Speak…on the voice of historical artifacts and our attraction to—even need for—them.

4. Photography: Cris Romagosa has a way with the body. [click “grafitogris” and scroll sideways in her portfolio].

5. Today in 1829, conjoined twins Chang and Eng arrive in Boston to be exhibited. Read Atlas Obscura’s well-illustrated article. There’s a note in the first paragraph that C&E were traveling with two of their sons, which is a good reason to consider the sex lives of conjoined twins. That helps explain the more than 15000 descendants of C&E who occasionally gather and celebrate.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

Re: “el de la vergüenza,” Reader M. notes a saying/proverb/superstition backed up in the book Superstitions: 10,000 You Really Need:

Take the last piece of bread and you will be an old maid.
Taking the last piece of cake means that you will never marry.
Taking the last portion of food from a dish will delay your wedding another year.

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