what we have here is a failure to communicate

‘Cinoc read slowly and copied down rare words; gradually his plan began to take shape, and he decided to compile a great dictionary of forgotten words, not in order to perpetuate the memory of the Akka, a black-skinned pigmy people of Central Africa, or of Jean Gigoux, a historical painter, or of Henri Romagnesi, a composer of romances, 1781-1851, nor to prolong the life of the scolecobrot, a tetramerous coleopter of the longicorn family, Cerembycid branch, but so as to rescue simple words which still appealed to him.‘
– from Life A User’s Manual by Georges Perec (trans. by David Bellos) p. 329

Thanks goodness I never bother to pull my sticky notes out of books that belong to me after I’ve finished reading them! Clearly marked “Cinoc’s dictionary”, this salmon-pink page marker among its 30 siblings was easy to turn to. My only difficulty was finding the book itself and digging it out of my 8+ book boxes, still stacked sadly in a corner of my new bedroom…

I came across the Save the Words project from Oxford University Press/The Oxford English Dictionary a few days ago and since then I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Cinoc and his dictionary. Save the Words encourages participants to adopt a word that is in danger of going extinct, and reintroduce it into their conversation and written communication. I can get behind that, and I think Cinoc would approve.

I have adopted the word “murklins”, which means in the dark. As in: I’m sitting here murklins, cursing daylight savings time and dreaming about what kind of lamp I will buy for my computer desk…and also what kind of computer desk. I have the feeling that this will not be the only nearly obsolete word that I adopt – I may not gather eight thousand of them, as Cinoc did, but perhaps eight new words a year is a good goal… 🙂