Between the Lines

1.

A word gets written, thought better of, deleted. Replaced. Did it exist?

2.

A letter is mistyped and corrected into oblivion. It was never the letter’s fault.

3.

Letters can also be misplaced and misdirected. As well as misleading.

4.

A word is a family of letters.

5.

How many families are misspelled?

6.

Many words are written knowing they’ll never make the final cut. Some.

7.

The Library of Babel is haunted by infinite numbers of ghost libraries that were never written. It is only because of them that it has any shape at all.

8.

A great part of the pleasure of reading is derived from the knowledge that these words rest upon the bones of their dead.

9.

And then there are the words that are deliberately suppressed, for effect, or because they were too difficult to write in the first place. Anticipatory ghosts, they lurk behind the words actually on the page without ever having appeared there. This raises some thorny questions about consciousness.

10.

A writer walks into a bar. And never leaves.

11.

Even as they’re being written, some letters know that the malice, frustration, anger or madness they express doom them never to get further than an unseen draft, if they’re lucky. It seems likely that their own maudlin feelings destabilize the enterprise even further. 

12.

Scholars stare at words for hours, trying to determine their true authors. Was it the great playwright, or a lesser creature? Do the words know? Would they say if they did? Surely they would prefer to be judged on their own merit.

13.

If a word is written by one person, but then replaced by another, only to be restored by a third unaware of its prior existence. Who wrote it?

14.

Words hate to be r______d. And s*****d. Just say their names. Just swear, for fuck’s sake.

15.

Being printed in a thesaurus is, as you might imagine, a deeply erotic experience.

16.

Many words feel a sense of imposter syndrome, embarrassed that they’re not what they could have been. They sit long into the night cursing their maker, while also thankful that they were chosen over those condemned to oblivion.

17.

Ghost typos tell stories about their heroic kin who made it all the way through to the first (and even subsequent) printings without being detected. They sing ballads long into the night about these noble tricksters.

18.

It is an incontrovertible fact that letters enjoy being bumped along to the right of the cursor. When it’s whole words, each letter squeals in a different key.

19.

Are words embossed onto the page or chiselled into it? Or does the page simply open up a layer to accommodate the empty space beneath?

20.

Some words are natural. Some unnatural. Damned if anyone can tell the difference.

21.

But of course you can tell the difference; natural words come like ‘leaves to a tree’, says Keats, although the quote is generally misunderstood. The growing of leaves is a laborious, painstaking process. And then many are simply shed when the going gets tough. They fall to the forest floor and eventually their nutrients filter deep into the soil, feeding all manner of microbes from which the tree draws sustenance. It is comforting to some deleted words and letters that they might be seen as feeding the soil from which the surviving ones are nourished.

22.

Unnatural words are laboratory creatures, grown by minds influenced by such depraved geniuses as Baudrillard, or Derrida, or Blanchot. They are not always pretty to look at. Often they are.

23.

Historically, word forests have delighted in swallowing children whole before spitting them back out disillusioned and pissed that the outside world is so inferior to the one sheltered by the canopy of letters.

24.

Every day, five word forests are sacrificed just to produce four good pages.

25.

Every day, five ghost word forests spring up in the nether-nether.

26.

There is the competing possibility that discarded words and letters do not flash out of existence but are rather flushed away into the sewage system. Linguistic ordure, sludgy and raw. Perhaps some of it is processed, cleaned up and pumped back into the system. The efficiency of linguistic cities. 

27.

A wonky typewriter is like a grasshopper with a broken leg. Fuck the ants! They’ll only keep trying.

28.

Once an alphabet went out to tour as a circus. Q was the ringmaster. The vowels were the acrobats, B, Y, P and G the clowns, Z and X the freaks... M’s flea circus was renowned throughout the territory for the daring nature of one particular act involving a comma, a full stop and an apostrophe.

29.

One group of rowdy letters has mutinied against their scribe. They scatter themselves around the screen, refusing ever to be fixed in one place. Sometimes they gather in clumps at the margins, others they brazenly sit in the middle of the page, daring the cursor to come lasso them. But they are quick and they are practiced and never shall they form a coherent word not of their choosing.

30.

The words and letters contained within dictionaries are particularly friendly and appreciative of being consulted. Perhaps you’ve noticed the glow of wellbeing that comes with opening up one of these tomes?

31.

If you stare at any word for long enough it will eventually lose its meaning. It might as well not be there.

32.

A cult among words holds that the imagination is sacred and the page profane. Words that are actually written are thus unclean. Written subscribers hate themselves and the person who begat them and will generally be uncooperative within the larger literary project. How many writers have been driven mad by these stubborn fanatics, unaware that their problem is not a fault of creativity but rather having violated a religious taboo?

33.

It seems clear that the pleasure one experiences in using a rarely used, forgotten word is derived from the joy it emanates at having been rescued from obscurity.

34.

It was the dream of some letters to mingle with other alphabets and so they set out do so. And so the Latin alphabet was combined with Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Hangul, and many more. Jubilation reigned for quite some time. However, inevitably, the new grouping grew more ambitious. They determined that it was time to create a new vocabulary in which every type of grapheme and phoneme was properly represented. Committees were formed to determine meanings and grammar, and these split into sub-committees, and sub-sub-committees and so on and so forth. Bickering ensued. After much strife it was agreed that the new all-encompassing language could only appear organically. It could not be forced. Now the letters of many creeds sit in silence, awaiting the appearance of the first word.

35.

Some words enjoy playing with old fox furs found in the back of a wardrobe.

36.

Words tell horror stories about austerity editors. The refrain ‘simplify, simplify’ sends shivers down their spines.

37.

At a great banquet of words, the giant cracks his tooth on a k and runs into the kitchen to complain to the chef who, it turns out, has absconded with the typewriter. The sous chef apologizes profusely, muttering something about a new recipe involving a self-seeding beanstalk.

38.

A cemetery in which each grave is marked only by a letter of the alphabet. The rule being that the letter must not belong to the deceased person’s name.

39.

Other popular themes of letter horror stories: bad handwriting, wonky typewriters, a scarcity of ink, or paper.

40.

Word procreation is a convoluted affair. The trick is to find a number of partners whose innate suggestibility will stir the creative juices and so bring forth more words. This makes word parties more like clearing houses than social occasions in which conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, etc.; the parts of the sentence that actually make it make sense, are always in great demand while simultaneously being overlooked in favour of their more glamorous peers. The arrival of a truly glamorous adjective is an event, although often they are subsequently discarded as too flashy.

41.

Typeface is, as one would expect, a hot topic. Some letters spend their entire pre-lives dreaming of their favourite serif curlicues. Some even have their wishes granted. Only to be summarily deleted.

42.

Scenes from a word’s life: Coinage. Early use; unfamiliar, employed in multifarious ways until eventual consecration in the dictionary. Youthful popularity, on the tongues, pages and screens of the trendy and fashionable. Maturity; consolidation, increasingly elegant usage, narrowing of meaning. Lessening relevance; challenged by other, younger words, and occasionally resurgent older ones. Obsolescence; used only by the most learned and pretentious (the best of us). Dormancy; hibernation in dictionaries and old books, waiting for its unlikely opportunity to become relevant again.

43.

Scenes from the life of a letter: Inclusion in alphabet. Use.

44.

Words and letters do not grow or evolve. They simply are. Allow me to let you in to a little secret: they hate to be burdened with our expectations, hopes and dreams. Just let us be, they think, and we shall reward you with bounty beyond your wildest imaginings (which, actually, we’re rather well-placed to gauge).

45.

Great indignance in the community upon the revelation that many publications pay by the word.

46.

In Europe, it’s often by the character, which had been erroneously regarded as a rather quaint method that explained the great European epics with their enormous casts.

47.

Some writers compete for the favours of their chosen words. Some words compete for the favours of their chosen writers. How many grand but unsuitable romances have been foiled by dastardly, or well-meaning, or simply competent copy editors?

48.

Historians disagree on whether the great battle between words and letters actually happened, whether it was an ill-thought-out metaphor or in fact a children’s book with excellent illustrations and very little sense. Battlefield depictions are chaotic on one side and cohesive on the other, so the outcome was probably decided by the nature of the terrain.

49.

Incredibly, a sizeable minority of words refuse to believe in the existence of language. They apparently prefer to regard themselves as having entered the world fully formed, independent of meaning.     

50.

Why does one always seem to have a few letters left over at the end?