The Word Exchange Read online

  The consequences of these deals would be swift, irreversible, and cataclysmic. With a corner on sales, nothing would prevent Synchronic from adjusting the price of words up. And the company might well be able to influence the market in such a way that terms would be available only through Memes—no other device, no print reference books—further changing the calculus of supply and demand.

  But far more worrisome: as language slides from people’s minds and begins to be stored more and more in just one place, the Exchange, accessible with just one machine, the Meme, it might conceivably become possible for people so motivated to begin manipulating our words in certain subtle ways that many people might not notice very quickly. Perhaps that sounds fantastical; not long ago, we thought pervasive Exchange use did, too. Many things that once seemed like fiction have come true. There are experts who also fear other hazards, even sickness. (We’re prevented from sharing more details about potential public health risks by a voluntary agreement between this paper’s editors and the U.S. government.)

  As more and more of our interactions are mediated by machines—as all consciousness and communication are streamed through Crowns, Ear Beads, screens, and whatever Synchronic has planned next, for its newest Meme—there’s no telling what will happen, not only to language but in some sense to civilization. The end of words would mean the end of memory and thought. In other words, our past and future.

  It may seem to some readers that the dystopian future we’re imagining is exaggerated or, at the very least, a long way off. We can only hope, for all our sakes, that they’re right. Because if not, then these and all words may very soon lose their meanings. And then we’ll all be lost.

  * * *

  1. I didn’t think to wonder then why they were bothering to use monitors; it occurred to me only later that the screens must have been for actual monitoring—so their foreman could watch their progress.

  2. When I was eight, he made me a dazzling blue and silver sword encrusted with sequins (which soon fell off). Amazed, I asked how he’d made it. “Wood and glue,” he said, shrugging. It had become one of our tropes, with different meanings—it could be used to signify something either magical or very prosaic. But mostly we said it when we meant “toughen up”: that we can fashion our strength from whatever we want.

  3. Like most New Yorkers, I’d heard the rumors about underground rivers and streams; the subbasement puddles were the only proof I’d seen. When I was a Columbia undergrad, I’d heard kids claim that water was running under Prentis Hall. But a far more famous subterranean brook had been discovered beneath the New York Athletic Club more than 120 years earlier—just a few blocks from the Dictionary.

  4. The smell appeared: melting butter, lemon zest. But so did a recipe, along with a link to a “shopping cart” already filled with all the ingredients. I had to think Not interested for it to go away.

  E

  em•pa•na•da ,em-pƏ-′nä-dƏ n : a source of considerable digestive discomfort

  Wednesday, November 21

  It’s been a weird and trying few days. But despite being single (pretty chronically), I’ve learned to make good on my promises. E.g., I still think Doug is fine. I grew up in a part of the country where men vanish sometimes—like my own father and Tobias, who occasionally drive my mother crazy by forgetting to mention that they’re going camping or hunting—and I know it’s not so different where Dr. D grew up.

  But I agreed on Sunday, per Friday night’s Devil’s bargain (glimpsing Ana in her pj’s ipso facto denotes that he was involved), to call the cops and report Doug as a missing person. (I think Ana may have a fever, or a mild case of shock. We had an exceedingly odd conversation Sunday—she was totally incoherent, mumbling something about creation or a basement or …? I’m more worried about her than D right now, frankly. Though she does seem maybe a little better, at least linguistically.)

  The bizarre thing is, it’s been three days since I made the report, and Doug still seems to be gone. Granted, the cops didn’t really opt in until yesterday. I’m sure he’ll turn up. Honestly, I wouldn’t be that surprised if he were just lying low somewhere, waiting out Friday’s party for the third-edition launch. (I would: 600 people! I’m starting to panic that if he doesn’t show, I might have to make some remarks. God, I hope he turns up soon.)

  Yesterday they interviewed Ana, Rodney, and me at the station. (Rodney was acting pretty strange—he tried to pull me aside to tell me something about the office surveillance system that I didn’t really understand.) Today police are investigating the office and I’m working from home. Well, sort of working. Trying to. But I’m having trouble focusing, which isn’t a problem that often afflicts me, so I’m not sure what’s going on. Maybe I really am worried about Dr. D. Or maybe it’s that Mom just left another message with the unsubtle observation that I won’t be home tomorrow for Thanksgiving. (It was lengthy: a cheerful, furtive guilt trip of the kind, slung with the ammo of banalities, that’s indiscernible to a lay ear. The same kind she deploys nearly every year, even though I’m following her advice by saving what little I can, which means staying here.)

  Honestly, it is hard not being in Illinois. Not attempting to split logs in the yard with Dad while we exchange almost no words. Not being force-fed warm ham biscuits by Mom while she tries to ask about my “love life.” Not getting punched in the chest by Tobias and handed a wad of chaw that I’ll deposit later, unchewed, in the hedge. Or playing Scrabble with Emma, who’s home on break from ISU. Being apart from them this time of year always does something a little twisty to my heart.

  But maybe my aberrant lethargy has a different antecedent. Maybe (okay, this is why) ever since I stayed the night at A’s place, I’ve been thinking about her a lot. Which has naturally prompted an inner inquisition into what she saw in Max.

  Not, I’m sure, his taste, which almost couldn’t be worse. He likes the hazy, sunstroked sixties oeuvre—Bob Marley, the Beatles, Jerry Garcia (he prefers songs exceeding 25 minutes), etc. Clearly very different from A’s musical proclivities. And, needless to say, mine. My favorite records from high school/the reason I survived southern Illinois are by Wire, the Jam, Television, Gang of Four, the Only Ones, et al.; Neil Young, Gram Parsons, the Stooges, Amon Düül II (whose 1969 record, Phallus Dei, kicked off the Krautrock movement); strange, sylvan Bulgarians singing the liturgy, etc.

  Max, like most people, also no longer really reads. When I had to dump a box of favorite volumes last year after a basement flood, and (trying to keep calm) recounted the terrible, tragic loss to the Hermes crew—a natty copy of Lolita I’d read at least three times; The Brothers K and The Thin Man and The Man Without Qualities; The Society of the Spectacle, Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right (or, as Max would argue, of the right); Black Hole; and, e.g., (fittingly) Bernhard’s The Loser—Max’s bemused response was, “Tell me again why you don’t have a Meme?” (He espouses—and truly practices—a disavowal of attachment to “things,” including, for instance, people.)

  I didn’t even mention the saddest loss of all: the bloated, boggy death of Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language. I attempted, fruitlessly, to dry it on the roof, and succeeded only in crackling the pages. It wasn’t a first edition, of course. Just some abridged 20th-century selection. Vera spent practically a home down payment on the 1755 edition as her wedding gift to Doug. My lowly imitation was the poor, toothless cousin to the two volumes Dr. D keeps under lock and key at home. But my mother had given it to me, in a rare bout of Midwest-transcending perspicacity, and I’d loved it for that reason.

  There’s more to life than music or books, though, I’m told. And I guess in some ways I’d like to be a little more like Max. There’ve been times, i.e., when I’ve wanted to tell Ana why I’ve devoted myself to this big, puddinglike language of ours, explain the reasons I chose to enlist at a dictionary instead of, say, start a start-up. But I think she’d be pretty unreceptive. And I’d like to save her, at the very least, from boredom.<
br />
  If I were, however, to enumerate a few of my motives, I might give her something like the list below. Although I’d never give her this list, specifically. For obvious reasons, I have no plans to share this journal with her.

  But speaking of this journal: first, a short apostrophe. During the most recent of what are fairly frequent exchanges between Dr. D and me, this one a month ago—or no, it must have been earlier, because we were celebrating having finally gotten everything off to the printer, drinking whiskeys at that Irish pub way over on Tenth—D was once again waxing overgenerous about some ancient Yale Lit Mag short story of mine, which I’d made the mistake of letting him read five years ago when he saw it on my résumé.

  I’ll gloss most of it—he made several embarrassing, overblown literary comparisons, per his wont, and while of course it’s nice to hear, he’s not exactly a paragon of subdued, unbiased judgment. (God knows I love the man, but he’s pretty easy to dismiss with stuff like this.) And yet over the course of his apology re: why I should “collate my pensées,” he said something that managed to sneak past my expertly laid defenses and actually get to me.

  Well, first, actually, he made his standard case: that the reasons no one reads these days are (i) so much “media” is now generated by algorithms and machines and can’t induce true “stirring in the soul” (I happen to agree), and (ii) because of the Meme, people are losing not just interest but the ability to engage. Then he went on to limn some pretty batty conspiracy theories—that Someone or Something is trying to commandeer language, take it over, “infect” it, erase it from the face of the earth, and that keeping a journal might both insulate me in some obscure way, and, potentially, serve as an important (ha) record if in fact that comes to pass. (These rants have grown worryingly recurrent; I’m hoping they’ll stop when he can get a little postpub rest.) For some reason he took that moment to invite me again—even though he knows it’s really not my thing—to join him at those Samuel Johnson meetings he attends. (Although I’ve just remembered that he also asked me not to write about any of this if he managed to convince me to start keeping a notebook …)

  But anyway, then he pointed out that we’d just achieved a monumental feat, which had taken nearly his entire professional life, and that I’d had the good fortune to help facilitate before turning 30. And he said this: “If none of that convinces you, Bartleby, just look at me. I wanted to do it once, too. Be a writer. Now I’m near 70, and the only thing I have to show for it is dictionary entries. Don’t get me wrong—I’m incredibly proud of it all. But let me say this, and I’ll say it only once: don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re just on a detour as you sail home for Ithaca. A little pit stop, if you like, with the Lotus-Eaters or Calypso. There’s no Athena interceding on your behalf. No guarantee you’ll eventually arrive. If there’s something you really want in life—especially if it’s something that scares you, or you think you don’t deserve—you have to go after it and do it now. Or in not very long you’ll be right: you won’t deserve it.”

  Histrionic as Doug can often be, I have to admit: it made an impression on me.

  He then offered a remark about how his daughter would never fall for a man for whom lexicography was the sole obsession, claiming that (even if it wasn’t obvious from her most recent choice of mate) she was helplessly smitten by creativity. That also caught my attention—and made me blush so much I had to go to the men’s room.

  So—here goes, I guess. Some of my collated pensées on language:

  1. HISTORY

  Language is the only tie that binds us to the otherwise vaporized ideas of the dead. It lets us hear the clanging air of history and slips the links of our own epoch onto that long concatenation.

  Every word is itself a memento of the past. Take, for example, the word “lousy” (a favorite of D’s). We’re all familiar with its modern meaning—awful, contemptible, etc.—popularized, e.g., by Holden C. c. 1951. That sense actually dates to at least 1532 and Sir Thomas More’s Confutacyon of Tyndales answere. Perhaps you won’t be surprised by a few of its earlier, more corporeal connotations (dirty, filthy, soiled) if we shuttle back to 1377, year of its first recorded appearance. Back then it denoted lice-ridden, beloused. The same expanded use has cropped up in other languages as well: lausig in German, pouilleux in French, piojoso in Spanish, and so on.

  How about the lithe little word “larva,” from the Latin, which had nothing to do with insects until the 18th century? In an earlier life it meant ghost or spirit. “Nightmare,” too, comes from the spectral realm. Derived from Old English niht (night) + mare (incubus), it applied to an evil, female-type phantom that settled (like Ana?) on sleeping innocents.

  “Buxom” once meant meek, “crazy” a thing cracked to pieces. And while some terms have undergone a painful pejoration, others have been plucky enough to rise, revived, from degraded ranks. There are also words that have enjoyed particularization: a deer was once any four-legged animal, a girl any child, meat any hunk of food. To be naughty was once to be worth nothing, while to be nice, in Middle English, meant to be stupid.

  Words are living legends, swollen with significance. We string them together to make stories, but they themselves are stories, encapsulating rich, runny histories.

  2. LINGUISTIC EVOLUTION AND DIACHRONY

  Language is incarnate. It’s the way our bodies evolved—to stand upright, to walk—that enables us to speak at all. And it’s our senses that give us reasons to talk. We want to verify with others what we seem to perceive. It’s also our bodies that give our words urgency: the tiny ticking clocks in each of our cells.

  Words, then, are born of worlds. But they also take us places we can’t go: Constantinople and Mars, Valhalla, the Planet of the Apes. Language comes from what we’ve seen, touched, loved, lost. And it uses knowable things to give us glimpses of what’s not. The Word, after all, is God. Some might say in fact that our ability to speak proves we’re made in the divine image (Bildung), as we, among all creatures, are the only ones that really talk.

  The way that came to pass is really pretty remarkable. Human babies, like other mute mammals, are incapable of speech; their airways are separate from their nutritive passages so they can pound gallons of milk. The upshot is a facility only to emit noise. For our vocal cords and diaphragms to develop, humans had to stand. Now every time a child learns to walk, the laryngeal tract shifts, the soft palate closes, and the miracle of evolution begins again.

  3. EXACTITUDE AND EVOCATION

  Language is infinite. It can be as creative, and as chillingly precise, as the human mind. Bombenbrandschrumpfleichen, e.g., a word coined per conditions distinct to the 20th century, means incendiary-bomb-shrunken bodies. Less distressing (in a sense) is shitta (Farsi): leftover dinner that’s eaten for breakfast. Or the Indonesian jayus, to bungle a joke so badly that your interlocutor feels forced to laugh. In Japanese, koi no yokan means the ineluctable feeling you have, upon meeting someone for the first time, that eventually the two of you will fall in love.

  Words compress impressions into facts cold as frozen quarters. One single word—like EMERGENCY, or love—can revise a whole night. A whole life.

  4. POETICS

  Just as language can be pliant enough to create a word for faces caramelized by firebombing, it’s elusive enough to mask them in metaphor. It can make disparate things seem alike, marry unwed ideas, hide things lying in plain sight (for instance, people, nations, wars).

  Definition, like poetry, is the project of revivifying the familiar. Making things we think we know seem newly strange. To estrange, according to Hegel, is requisite to practicing consciousness. He also thought recollection requires interiorization of language, and to describe the place from which recollections are drawn, he used metaphor: it’s a “night-like pit in which a world of infinitely many images is kept.”

  And from our pits we draw: a world like a stage, the number seven, small hands like rain, time like money, lions that lie down with lambs, whoopee cushi
ons, broken hearts.

  5. LOVE

  Language seems to be the only means for linking consciousnesses, the most effective way to stifle loneliness and pull us from our night-like pits. (Maybe not the most effective. Some might argue on behalf of physical contact. But words are more accessible. To me, at least.)

  Language also acts like love in form. The sign, according to Hegel, is a union between the external word and its inlying meaning. But this idea can also be extrapolated. A few years ago I read a quite compelling philosophical theory claiming that one could read in Hegel an argument for a universal grammar. The same argument can be applied to love. Underlying every lexicon is a hopeful faith in the existence of order: i.e., that words will be arranged to make sense. The feeling of love, likewise, presupposes the existence of an object of love around which to organize. Similarly, the concept of a universal grammar presumes specific lexicons (e.g., German, Hebrew, Japanese), just as the universal feeling “love” presumes a contingent, particular love (e.g., Anana Johnson).

  6. DIVERSION

  Finally, language is a good distraction; it shields us from thinking of other things (like love).

  Okay, writing is hard. And now I’m starving. Going to the pushcart for empanadas.

  November 21 (much later)