Did you speak to Syme about the Eleventh? Winston tells me he is the expert, having compiled it almost by himself. Or is he an unperson… or have I got the wrong speculative-fiction, cinematic universe?
What a triumph your writing is to make administration of book so enthralling and oddly rapid… a great feat thinking about how much laborious, hand wringing goes into developing this kind of document.
Such a specific look into the bizarre meta lexicography of compiling meaning is no easy thing to make so compelling. Nowadays words gather meaning from momentum and usage and above all memeability (which may or may not be a word, let me consult my one chosen source of truth: Urban Dictionary). The words we see today might as well be blank, though nowadays there isn’t much interest in such open possibility. Someone rushes to fill everything with meaning. And how we agree to it is by fiat if the algorithms that allow for its spread.
Whether old or new, the way meaning is derived through lexicography or a man named Alex or jammed minced garlic and jar together to create ‘Jarlic’, is infinitely fascinating. And in your hands this story feels like it could have been a fascinating chapter in a larger text… or as we have it here, a standalone piece carrying its own unique meaning.
Syme would have hated this book. His whole job was making the dictionary thinner every year, fewer words, the meanings clamped down so tight you couldn’t think a bent thought if you wanted to. That’s subtraction. What I did runs the other way and somehow comes out worse….. Nobody took the words away here. They left the headword, the little italic n. underneath it, the measured white space where a meaning is supposed to go, and then declined to put anything in the space. The word stays fully dressed. There’s just nothing inside the coat.
The thing about Jarlic that I keep turning over is that it works. It lands! It really lands! You shove the two halves together and a real jar of real garlic waits at the far end of it so the momentum you describe does arrive somewhere eventually. What put the fear in me was the reverse case. A word everyone treats as full that not one person can cash out. Not racing toward meaning. Already wearing the look of having meant something, with nothing standing behind the look.
And no, I never spoke to Syme. You can’t, by the end. That’s rather the point of him.
Thank you, Adam, for going down into the slip drawers with me instead of skating over them! That basement was the part I was sure would put people to sleep, and you went and called it the liveliest thing on the floor. How delightful!!!
There is something of a malformed idea coming to mind, as you pushed back on Syme’s preference for subtraction in his eleventh edition versus the version Mrs Aldous (ahem, don’t think I didn’t see you trying to open our doors of perception to your brave new world) helped form with phantom errata forms. Whether you are affixing a completely non-interoperable meaning to a word or if you are giving it the pristine white space of complete silence in the definition section under the head word and its grammatical designation, they both amount to the same thing: you are manipulating reality. Which we all do to some extent, to stave off entropy. But through language we are at our most human trying to use symbols to make sense of the world — opening a space for thoughts or constraining them to the extreme degree has an inorganic impact on how we can use language to alter reality with severe consequences.
The reason I call the idea malformed is that I somehow put both your characters and Orwell’s into the role of propagandists and it felt right… which was my first worry!
Anyway, I wonder if you have it in your bring form to this half-baked idea!
First, yes! You caught it. Mrs Aldous is Aldous on purpose, and you’ve got your finger right on the smuggling. And I knew you’d say something. Orwell’s fear was scarcity, the boot, the word taken off you. Huxley’s was the soft version, where they hand you so much comfort you stop caring what’s true. The blank word is the Huxley road. Nobody is deprived of it. They are handed it for nothing, it’s pleasant to hold, and Mrs Aldous’s shrug is soma made out of paperwork. So the two dystopias you felt sliding into each other were both already in the room. I just kept one of them under a surname.
Now the half-baked part, which isn’t. You cast everyone as a propagandist and then flinched, and the flinch is the find. Subtraction and the white space meet because they do the one same thing to a word. They make it impossible to be wrong with. Newspeak burns the words you’d need to even think the dissenting thought. The blank entry leaves the word standing and pulls out the meaning you’d have checked it against. Two different methods. What gets left behind is the same. And a word you can’t be wrong with is the propagandist’s whole kit because propaganda was never really lying. A lie still needs the truth, it has to know what it’s turning over. The pure form skips all that,removes the test that sorts a true word from a false one, and once that’s gone there’s nothing left to lie about, only things to say again. That’s why both casts walked into the same role on you. One gets there by taking words away, the other by leaving the space open, and the silence at the end is the same silence, which is the part that ought to keep us up.
Thank you for handing it to me half-built and trusting me to find the joints! You’d set most of them already. I tightened a couple and pointed at the wall it leans on.
I think I trusted you with the malformed idea because my pause was a protective mechanism. Reading this clarity you shared has left me with a bit of vertigo!
I always had the Huxley/Orwell binary as two avenues to a shared principle: control. One through austerity the other through abundance. The two worlds make this materially salient through dust in pores and soma in bodies… but when you dissolve the two dystopian worlds in the acid of this contention (did I read a short story or a philosophy… does it matter which?) we are left with the fundamental building blocks of cultural meaning: words.
Whether written or said the adjudicators of meaning (I am, now, also on team #Jarlic! I invoked it as silly example… now it has more meaning than I gave it credit for) are in possession of a cataclysmic weapon. The power to mobilize the human organism, and manipulate them en masse to follow a script, secreted in through either constraint or unmitigated openness. But as you say, the outcome is the same… our silence.
That’s the vertigo. Control always struck me as an active process to make something do something. But when I consider your framing the control is done through silencing… a silent space (to think of the antithesis to a certain salon) is where there is no friction. No meeting of ideas to grow and develop into something, though challenging to construct, that can make a difference and upend dangerous trajectories.
Are we living in an age of cacophony where the din is so overwhelming we are, despite the noise, entirely silent? Entirely at the mercy of what passes for modern meaning-making, as we are not, on any level, adding our own voice to the creation of the world we live in?
Dystopia through the shared view of the Orwell/Huxley lens looks unnervingly like the world we are in now. Social media crafting taste. AI generating meaning, most of us in a form of silent coma… dragged along with little to no agency.
If it wasn’t obvious. I am a big fan of your short stories. :)
Story or philosophy. The form was the disguise the whole time. You dress the idea up as a man with a bad back and a basement full of paper slips, so it gets waved past the part of you that braces against being lectured, and by the time you feel the philosophy working it’s already inside the house. So no, it doesn’t matter which. That was the smuggling.
But I would file your word down a little. I don’t think we are silent. We have never talked more. Any one of us can publish in the middle of the night to the whole planet. What’s gone isn’t the speaking. It’s the consequence of it. You say a thing into the feed, the feed takes it, logs it, shows it to a few strangers, and hands you back nothing you could build on. Remember the housing form, where you ticked yes or no about the damp and the box fed into nothing. That’s the whole world now. We aren’t gagged. We are unanswered, which is the stranger fate because a gagged person at least knows they have been stopped. The loud, unreceived one feels busy the entire time they’re being managed.
Which is where your salon line got me, because you’ve put your hand on the only counter I actually trust. Friction needs finitude. A small room and an evening. Few enough faces that a word can be challenged and you have to sit there, watch the challenge land, and answer for it. The feed can’t do that. Scale is the very thing that dissolves the friction because at scale nobody has to hear your reply, they just scroll past it. So the answer to the noise was never more voice. It was a smaller room. The old discomfort of being disagreed with to your face by someone who isn’t going anywhere. The machines flooding a billion feeds can manage nearly everything now. They cannot sit at a table for 3 hours and be argued with, and that limit isn’t the room’s weakness. It’s the whole of its power.
I won’t pretend that scales back up to rescue the world. It doesn’t. But it’s the one place left where a word can still be wrong, and the words that can still be wrong are about the only ones doing any work.
Welcome to TeamJarlic, properly this time! You came in for the stories and stayed to take two dystopias apart with me, and that is the best thing the work has been told. Thank you, Adam!
You aren’t filing my word down, you are giving it a different spin.
We are rendered — despite the noises emanating from our mouths or avatars online — silent in the sense we are not contributing. That’s a horrible inversion: give everyone the ability to say anything at any volume and they think they have a voice, but it is just an orchestra comprising kids with a box and a mallet and a told to drum. The illusion is they are making music, the reality is the adults are in another room, pleased to be rid of attention seekers, but making plans the kids are entirely unaware of.
My use of silence was less about what comes out of our mouths and more what is coming out of our minds to affect the society and reality we occupy… which, even in the din we make, is the equivalent of nothing.
So, to the salon conveners, please continue what you are doing! You might not save the world, but often just trying to doing something meaningful is its own heroic effort. Who knows what that act inspires?
It seems we have uncovered the darker side of The Graile Affair. Is it possible this may become known as The Voss Conspiracy? And how dark do you think it's going to get? Or is it sprine and we just don't see it yet? Obrene doesn't seem to have the gentle simplicity of plenivar. There is something a little more dangerous in its usage - or is that scantled thinking? Hmmm.
Love it! The Voss Conspiracy. You have gone and promoted it from hypothesis, and I think you are close, except a conspiracy wants a culprit and this one hasn’t got one. Nobody decided. The words just got loose and turned out lighter to carry than the real ones, and easy runs downhill on its own.
Here’s what snags me, though. You hear danger in “obrene” that you don’t hear in “plenivar”, and no dictionary told you to. The sound did. That ob at the front is the old Latin for “against”, for “in-the-way-of”, the same prefix hiding under obscure and obstruct. Your ear filed in the meaning the page refused to print. So no, that isn’t scantle thinking. :))) Rather the reverse. It’s evidence the words were never as empty as I kept insisting, because the body goes on assigning sense even when the entry won’t.
How dark does it get? I cut the narrator off before her last sentence finished for a reason.
Thank you, Doc, for setting the two of them side by side and feeling the temperature drop between Graile and this! That drop was the whole reason there’s a second story at all. And I’m so moved you remember that one.
Is it possible the unwitting culprit is Helena Voss herself, whose book, After Meaning: Communication in a Post-Definition Age legitimized the undefinable words that everyone understood by using them?
Voss as the culprit is a good catch, and the unfair part is that she would walk free on the same plea everybody uses. She didn’t invent the words. All she did was write down what was already in other people’s mouths. Which is exactly Mrs Aldous saying the meaning was not her department. Description turns out to be the alibi the whole century runs on. Nobody did it. Everyone only kept a record of it happening.
As for the cut-off sentence, I think she stopped because the only words left to finish it were the blank ones, and she knew that, and couldn’t make herself reach for them.
Glad it stuck with you!! And thank you for the Nat King Cole verdict, which is gentler than the story has any right to.
Yes! He belongs over the whole thing. Except the blank word works more silently than the four he listed. Anchoring, distraction and the rest all fence the dread off and leave it sitting there behind the fence, still intact. The empty word does one better than that. It removes the very thing consciousness would have had to wrestle with, so there’s no anguish of meaning left to guard against because there’s no meaning. A fixed point that holds nothing. His relief, without the bother of having to fasten yourself to something real.
The part that would have got to him is the niece. He wanted the species to stop handing its surplus awareness down the line. Here it hands the sedative down instead, parent to child, and files it under school.
Thank you for mentioning him! I had totally forgotten Zapffe.
Strange. I had looked up the correct word then transformed it in my memory.
I’m watching the film Camille Claudel 1915. I had only seen the much earlier film before, about her time of seeing and feeling in the time of her creations. I have to understand it with subtitles. Sometimes I think I only see you with subtitles which is my loss. Yet, I can feel Camille even if this film is purely fiction.
I’m wondering if the truly sane appear to be insane to those that do not fully observe and feel the world around them.
No need to reply. You have provided me with copious replies already that I’m still ingesting, like eating food slowly to fully taste the food.
I wonder if someone like you existed a hundred years ago could have been condemned as insane as was Camille.
Probably I told you before, but I am obsessed with Camille Claudel. You felt her through a language you don’t have, in a film about a woman gone a hundred years, and she reached you all the same. The subtitle was not the loss. The feeling got across whole. And everyone reads everyone this way. Even in your own tongue you only ever get the words, never the thing in the other head that the words are standing in for. The complete version you think you miss was never on the table for anyone.
Whether a person gets called mad, though. I don’t think the verdict was ever really about Camille’s perception. It was about who held the pen. Her brother and her mother could sign the paper and she couldn’t sign her way back out. The label tracked the authority. The seeing barely came into it. So the real question isn’t whether the clear-eyed look insane to the half-asleep. Sometimes they do. It’s who happens to be nearer the door when a signature is wanted.
Thank you for setting me beside Camille. But she paid for her seeing. I only get to write about people who did.
Was it here or another writing you used the word ‘pomfeed’. I stopped there because I didn’t know that word growing up and living in the Sonoran Desert. I looked it up and had sense of why you chose it, knowing I could be wrong. So instead of understanding exactly I went with how I felt it knowing that I could not fully explain what I felt and now have let it go.
As I type this with one finger I’m realizing that to read you trying to understand every nuance is blocking the more important of just feeling what you wrote. Of course I realize what I feel is created by myriad experiences within my own life.
And the missing words actually amplify the feeling and not the understanding.
It was here, and the word was Pomfret. You’ve kept him in your memory as pomfeed, which I had to read twice, because that’s the whole story happening inside a single reader. You met a word you didn’t grow up with, never pinned it, and the version that stayed with you came out a little altered. Obrene would be proud. Pomfret less so. He was a complainer.
What you call just feeling it was understanding. The older sort, the sort that runs ahead of the dictionary and is mostly right. You felt the man was tired and put-upon, the type who tells you about his back, and that’s everything the name had to carry. The lookup adds nothing.
Here’s the line I don’t want you to walk past, though. Your feeling worked because Pomfret had a back that actually hurt. There was a made thing waiting on the far side of the word for the feeling to land on. That’s what separates him from obrene, where nothing waits behind the feeling at all, and that absence is the point where feeling without meaning turns into the trap. Your instinct was sound because the word had a man standing behind it.
Thank you for spending all those one-fingered keystrokes on a stranger’s story, and on about the most honest thing anyone’s told me about how to read one.
Tamara, how convincingly you turned an absence into a functioning social system. The blank definitions behave like real institutional tools, spreading through meetings, forms, schools, and marriages with a logic that feels disturbingly plausible. That is a remarkable achievement because the story never relies on spectacle, only on the accumulation of small, believable compromises.
One detail that I find quite amazing. Edge reading the entire Eleventh in search of a single intact definition. In a story full of ambiguity, that small act of stubborn verification becomes unexpectedly moving. It gives the narrative an emotional anchor and reminds us that resistance often begins with something as simple as checking whether the record still matches reality.
Professions change their standards to accommodate the blank words. Imagine engineers, doctors, or architects beginning to use them in reports because the undefined terms provide protection from accountability. At that point the words would no longer just obscure meaning. They would become a kind of social insurance policy against being wrong. That would deepen the story’s central insight that the erosion of language persists. Uncertainty can become more convenient than precision.
The final paragraphs are very strong because they refuse a simple conspiracy. The observation that “easier is a current” captures something larger than the setting and gives your story its lasting weight. It is ostensibly about language, but what it really examines is the human preference for frictionless thinking, and it does so with impressive restraint.
Tamara, this is as incredible as “The Graille Affair” you recently published.
The insurance reading is correct, and I want to shove it one step further into the cold. A blank word shields you from the blame. It does nothing whatever about the wall. The damp still comes through, the report still ticks a box that feeds into nothing, and somewhere down the line the thing a doctor or a surveyor signed off on behaves exactly as physics insists it should, no matter which undefined term sat in the file. So the policy pays out in one currency only, the avoidance of fault, while the world goes on charging in the other. That gap is where the harm sits. It is a wide gap. It widens.
I’m glad Edge reached you because he’s the one I couldn’t bring myself to write coldly. There’s a crueller thing folded under his search that I only implied. Suppose he had found his single intact definition. It would have proved nothing. One proper entry in a book of blanks doesn’t read as the rule the rest betrayed. It feels it’s the error. The whole order had already swapped over which kind of word needs explaining, so in a place built on empty entries, meaning is the anomaly. It’s the thing someone forgot to leave out. He was hunting for evidence the new world would have filed under mistake.
That this sits beside Graile for you matters, since the pair were never meant to be read apart. Thank you for tracking the small compromises instead of asking the story to hand you a villain, Alexander! There wasn’t one to give.
This is brilliant because it understands something most political dystopias miss, that language does not collapse when words are forbidden but when words become infinitely elastic.
The Eleventh Edition feels like a forensic report on the present. Today we are surrounded by terms that function exactly as “obrene” does in the story, words invoked with absolute certainty and almost no agreed definition. Everyone is expected to use them, few can define them, and asking for clarification is treated as a moral failure. The result is a culture where fluency increasingly outranks understanding. We no longer ask, “What does this mean?” but “Do I know how to deploy it?” The niece’s observation may be the most chilling line in the story because it captures the modern condition perfectly. Language becomes a badge of belonging rather than a tool for thought.
I love that you never point at the reader and announce the lesson. You simply leave the blank space on the page and trust us to notice how many of our own words have already begun to resemble it. That is far harder, and far more powerful, than satire. Tamara — the wordsmith.
The forbidden-versus-elastic distinction is the one I most wanted someone to walk straight up to, and there’s a part of it that only shows itself once you sit a while. A banned word leaves a hole the exact shape of what was taken. You can feel the edge of it. People smuggle the word back, scrawl it on walls. They build an underground around the missing thing because prohibition at least hands you something to push against and something to put back. The elastic word leaves no hole. Nothing was removed. It sits there fully present and completely hollow, so there’s no edge to find your fingers on and no one to be a dissident about. You can’t run a résistance for a definition that was never written. That’s why my version outlasts the Orwell one. Edge can read the whole book and there’s simply nothing for him to restore.
Your reading also showed me the niece might not be the future. She could be the older state of things coming back. People recited oaths and prayers they couldn’t parse for most of recorded time. The odd interval was the one where we expected a word to be a window with a verified thing on the far side of it, and we keep calling its end a decline because we took the exception for the rule.
Thank you, Clara, for not wanting the moral pinned to the page, and for treating the blank space as the argument instead of a hole in it! The space was doing the work. You let it.
It's interesting how "obrene" is very close to "obscene", and is used as such in the story, or at least, as something close to "offensive". Beyond how the word is used, questioning its use is also treated as "obscene", in this world where looking for definitions in blank spaces becomes a form of blasphemy.
Many people don't realize that this is the origin of the term "political correctness", which doesn't mean polite or progressive, but something that is "politically" correct, as opposed to being actually correct. It was meant to identify instances where something must be accepted for political reasons, whether it's true or not. Similarly, "obrene", once it became common parlance, no longer needed a definition, only correct contextual use, hence why people were taught how to use it, not what it meant.
In the same way that the Stalinist flavor of political correctness had nothing to do with truth, the use of "obrene" has nothing to do with meaning; it becomes a signal of conformity and obedience. More important than conveying information, its usage was about conveying civilizational allegiance, or on a less grand scale, upholding the social contract. The word itself rests on two separate planes of existence, one as a meaningless blank entry in The Eleventh Edition, and the other as a final word or coda to signify full acceptance of the status quo.
This was brilliant, Tamara. On the surface, it's a commentary on how words can mean whatever we want them to mean, and how equivocations, however incorrect, become functional. But you've gone beneath the surface to map out something deeper: that the definitions of words are far less relevant to how they are used, and that most of us communicate based on the latter, unwittingly or not, to signify and secure our place in the tribe.
There’s a reading of “obscene”, contested but hard to let go of, that traces it to “ob scaena”, off the stage, the thing not to be shown to the audience. So when this world starts treating the question as obscene, it’s shoving the question into the wings. Not the answer. The asking. The act of crouching down to look under the word is the part that gets pulled behind the curtain.
And the tribe point you land on has a very old ancestor. The “shibboleth”, in Judges, was a word nobody cared to define. Ear of corn, or a flood, depending which gloss you trust. The men of Gilead used it at the fords and the test had nothing to do with what it named. You said it right or you said it wrong, and if you said it wrong, sibboleth, they killed you on the riverbank. The content was dead weight. The pronunciation carried the whole verdict. That’s some 3,000 years ahead of anyone needing the phrase political correctness, and it’s the same engine turning over, a word kept hollow on purpose so it can do the one task a defined word can’t, sorting who belongs from who doesn’t, on the spot, with no appeal.
A definition would only get in the way. You can argue with a meaning, pick at it, ask for the page reference. A password hasn’t got a page. You produce it or you don’t.
Andrew, thank you for dragging the Stalinist sense of the term into the open, since it’s the piece nearly everyone skips, and for seeing the two planes….. though I’d press you on one thing. They aren’t quite separate. The blank is what qualifies the word for the job.
This is extraordinary work, Tamara. Is this a story about convenience? I think it is. That is far more unsettling. The blank definitions are frightening, but the real masterpiece is the gradual revelation that nobody is forced to surrender meaning. They volunteer it because precision is exhausting and ambiguity is comfortable.
Reading this reminded me of a board meeting years ago where a proposed strategy survived six hours of scrutiny without anyone ever defining what success would actually look like. The presentation was full of polished words: “alignment”, “synergy”, “transformation”, and everyone left satisfied. A month later, I realized those terms had functioned exactly like obrene. They created the feeling of agreement without the burden of agreement itself. The room had been full of intelligent people, yet the emptier the language became, the smoother the conversation flowed. That frightened me more than any outright lie could have.
One detail I kept thinking about afterward. I wonder if there were people who began collecting private definitions in secret notebooks to preserve their own meaning. Little underground dictionaries where a husband, a teacher, a mechanic, a child each wrote what words meant to them before the blanks arrived. Over time, those notebooks would become more valuable than the Eleventh Edition itself since they represented the last stubborn refusal to let language become communal fog.
The achievement here is the precision of the narrator’s voice. It never raises its voice, never performs outrage, never explains more than it must. The calmness becomes the horror. By the end, the blank space under “obrene” feels less like a missing definition than a mirror held up to every institution, relationship, and conversation that survives on words nobody has bothered to interrogate. That is remarkably difficult to pull off, and you do it with such confidence that the story feels less invented than remembered. I loved it.
Convenience, yes! That’s the right name for it, and the unflattering part is that it never feels like surrender while you are inside it. It feels like good sense. Your board meeting is a cleaner specimen than anything I made up since nobody in that room was lying and nobody was forced and it happened regardless. The empty words were what let the meeting end before midnight. Precision would have started a fight, turned the 6 hours into 12, sent you all home agreeing on nothing. So the hollow language was performing a service. That’s the part that doesn’t sleep at night.
The secret notebooks undid me a little, and I want to walk them somewhere sadder than where you set them down. A private definition is nearer to a diary. Meaning is the one thing you can’t hoard, because it only lives in the gap between two people who happen to agree. The husband writes what obrene meant to him, the teacher writes hers, and each feels they’ve rescued something. Then one night they lay the pages side by side and find the entries don’t match, never quite did, and the comparing is what tells them so. The underground wouldn’t preserve a single lost tongue. It would splinter into a notebook’s worth of private ones, each warm to its keeper and no use to anyone else. A recipe survives a drawer like that. A meaning won’t.
Thank you for carrying in the board room, Céline! It proved the story better than the story manages on its own.
“In the beginning was the Word,...and the Word was God….The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us….” (John 1:1-14)
Through sheer obstinacy, I am a definition miner. Sporadic, but insistent. But I like to think I look words up if I’m not familiar with them and can’t make any sense of them in the context of the sentence. Words, it seems, are like little deities, a bit like burning bushes, pronouncing themselves into being and into a vernacular. They not only reveal phenomenological secrets, they act as communal support stakes. They are meaning links, helping minds join hands together. Even so, as with burning bushes they are subject to many interpretive pitfalls. The links are not so much chain-like as they are little Vinn diagrams staking out common ground. Two or more minds encircle some shared meaning, while much elastic dissonance remains in each mind’s contextual background. Words point, within certain constraints. They burn the bush, and still fail to ignite the listener’s mind at times. That is, they don’t always land perfectly.
Even though I strive for understanding and precise application, a devout word miner like me has only looked up what, maybe a few hundred, a thousand? words in my lifetime. Thousands more must become flesh through trial and error. And that works pretty well on the whole. As often as not words are shaped by running a gauntlet of fiat parlance, floating on faint clouds of trust, decoupled from the gold standard of their given lexicography. This may partly explain why Mrs Aldous is so nonchalant about the blank space left by the Eleventh Edition errata words. Experience assures her that ‘obrene’, and the others, will still become flesh through circulation. Words preen for attention like gods. Some catch feelings and stick. And if the public accepts them, they dwell well among us.
That is how the errata words of the Eleventh Edition operate as well. With fewer initial constraints than their defined counterparts, they are freer to mutate and search out a center. But like all words, fiat meanings eventually flesh themselves out through usage.
Take the word ‘jarlic.’ Now there’s a word that may hold if parlance gives it legs. (God knows it could also show up in a slop essay one day with an entirely new usage as some LLM grabs it from obscurity and revitalizes it: “Mom! Junior is jarlicing the honey again.” (LLM’s are not as smart as they pretend to be!)) Otherwise, it will rise briefly like a bubble in a boiling roil, then return forgotten to the water from which it appeared. It all comes down to its fiat force.
In other words, fiat words, like the Robert Ryman installation, earn more weight than simple vacuity would seem to postulate. The canvases hang in a similar generative state of fluidity, for sure. Presumable, each viewer will fill them with their own imaginative life, and as those revelations become flesh, parlance will shape them into a local vernacular. Like cloud shapes, the blank canvas can propagate multiple projections which solidify into something durable through sharing.
You have quoted the one incarnation that argues against you, I think. The Word in John takes flesh once. A single body, in one place, that people could stand beside and point at and argue over with the same man in front of them. That is what a shared meaning actually needs, a body everyone is looking at together. The blank word does the reverse. It takes flesh in every mouth and never the same flesh twice. Not one incarnation. A thousand private ones that never get into the same room. Your own Venn diagram gives the game away. With a real word the circles overlap so far that the shared patch is most of the figure and the dissonance sits out at the rim. Obrene’s two circles barely kiss. The overlap is a sliver, the rest of the page stays unshaded, and the whole wager of the story is only that the sliver keeps thinning, because nothing holds it, until the circles slide off each other entirely. That drift is where the marriage ends. The tribunal sits inside it too. So does the wet wall and the box that fed into nothing.
I think choosing Ryman was the strongest move because the white paintings aren’t vacant and the man would have loathed the word. He was a fanatic about their matter. The exact white, the weave of the support, the fasteners, the edge, the particular wall and the light coming across it. He took the depicted thing out and then poured everything into the surface and the making, so the canvas pays back the closest looking you can give it. The blank entry punishes that same looking. Edge looked closer than anyone alive and came away with nothing because nothing had been made there to find. A Ryman viewer in front of all that white stands before a thing somebody laboured over. A speaker reaching for obrene looks into a mirror with the silvering scraped off. One is generous. The other only does a passable impression of it, and from the right angle you can’t tell the two apart, which is more or less the entire problem.
The fiat line is clever, yet fiat money floats free of gold, yes, but it holds because one bank stands behind it and everyone keeps the same ledger. The blank word has no bank. Each speaker mints his own note down in the cellar and calls it legal tender, and when two notes meet and don’t match you get the tribunal working out afterward what the note was worth, by whoever happened to stand nearer the door.
(And Junior jarlicing the honey is a better sentence than half of what reaches print.)
Dear Andrew, thank you for the most theological thing anyone’s set down under this story! You came to bless the void and built the sharpest case against it I’ve been handed. I’m keeping hold of the argument. Whether I’m winning it tonight, I haven’t decided.
I’m not sure where to begin. Ever since I discovered your writing, I’ve been praising you so much that I’m afraid my comments might start to sound mechanical. But I’ll still try.
I loved it instantly on the first read. Then I took a break and came back to it an hour later. I loved it even more. I missed some subtleties the first time. It was very rewarding. I’ve never written anything like this. All of your writing reminds me that I still have a long way to go before I can truly call myself a writer. You moved me. I hope that someday I can make a reader feel the same thing like what you made me feel today. Long live!
Don’t worry about the mechanical thing! A machine wouldn’t take the hour’s break and come back. It wouldn’t notice it had walked past something the first time. That returning, and finding more on the second pass than the first, is the part to keep an eye on in yourself because it’s the writer’s faculty that shows up before any of the others do. You can only lay a second layer into your own pages if you are the sort of reader who reaches for one in everybody else’s. So the thing you hand me is actually a piece of your own equipment.
And the long way to go doesn’t go away, by the way. Every writer worth reading still feels it out in front of them. The ones who decide they have arrived are the ones who stop being worth the trouble. That distance you stand in isn’t proof you aren’t a writer yet but the room writers do the work in.
Thank you, Prashanth, for coming back! Most things never get the second read, and the second read is where you actually met the story. Long live yourself! I am grateful to have readers like you.
The most unsettling moment is that she knew what her husband meant, without knowing what the word meant. The story never really leaves that distinction.
It’s the one spot in the whole story where an empty word lands perfectly. Everywhere else the blanks make fog; between those two it carried clean, no loss at all. That’s the worse news because it means the word was never the part doing the work. He reached her by tone and timing, and by all those years in the same kitchen, and the blank word was only the thing his meaning rode in on. The emptiness didn’t fail there. It showed how little the meaning had ever been needed.
Thank you for halting on that exact sentence. It’s the one I would defend last.
Our love of quirky words; is it a blessing or a curse? Who needs quirky words anyway? Idle poets? I sprinkle them on my word salads. How can I use “obrene” if I can’t look it up? (I love this essay, like tumbling down the ski hill after falling and coming up smiling.)
Haitian Creole has a lot of quirky words. I discovered you can translate whole pages of almost any language, including Haitian Creole, into almost any language instantly with Translate King, free from Google. I translated a beautiful Haitian Creole song, a mother singing to her infant, into English, up to now available only in Haitian Creole. Then I covered the song using Suno AI:
Until I understood the words I was just a dumb but admiring spectator. Now I feel much closer to the Haitians simply because I understand the words. I loftily said to my parents when I chose my journalism major 50+ years ago, “Words are as cosmically significant as numbers.” (Dad was skeptical but he came around.) I’m in a quiet corner of McDonalds on my bike ride break. Tamara’s essays - “I’m lovin’ it”.
“Obrene” is the one word you are now completely free to use, since there’s nothing to look up there’s no way to get it wrong. You’re pre-qualified. Sprinkle it on the salad! :)
But here’s what your Haitian Creole adventure does that the poor souls in my story never manage. You went after a meaning and you actually caught one, and rather than leaving you stranded it walked you up close to a whole roomful of people you’d only been nodding at from the back. That’s the blank word run backwards. The empty one shuts you out. A translated lullaby crossed an ocean. Edge spent a year hunting a meaning that was never in the book to begin with. You went hunting one that was sitting right there in another language, and it answered, in a mother’s voice no less.
And your journalism-major self was right, Douglas! The lullaby is the proof your dad would have to fold on now. A number can do nearly everything. It can’t sing a baby down in a tongue you don’t speak.
Thank you for the dispatch from the corner of McDonald’s, and for the ski-hill line, which is the most cheerful thing anyone’s said about reading me!
I'm an advocate of LLMs but this comment feels heavily processed by AI, not polished. The irony is to find such comment on a post about habit taking over meaning. Perhaps, these post are the norm now. This is so obrene-esque!
Did you speak to Syme about the Eleventh? Winston tells me he is the expert, having compiled it almost by himself. Or is he an unperson… or have I got the wrong speculative-fiction, cinematic universe?
What a triumph your writing is to make administration of book so enthralling and oddly rapid… a great feat thinking about how much laborious, hand wringing goes into developing this kind of document.
Such a specific look into the bizarre meta lexicography of compiling meaning is no easy thing to make so compelling. Nowadays words gather meaning from momentum and usage and above all memeability (which may or may not be a word, let me consult my one chosen source of truth: Urban Dictionary). The words we see today might as well be blank, though nowadays there isn’t much interest in such open possibility. Someone rushes to fill everything with meaning. And how we agree to it is by fiat if the algorithms that allow for its spread.
Whether old or new, the way meaning is derived through lexicography or a man named Alex or jammed minced garlic and jar together to create ‘Jarlic’, is infinitely fascinating. And in your hands this story feels like it could have been a fascinating chapter in a larger text… or as we have it here, a standalone piece carrying its own unique meaning.
Syme would have hated this book. His whole job was making the dictionary thinner every year, fewer words, the meanings clamped down so tight you couldn’t think a bent thought if you wanted to. That’s subtraction. What I did runs the other way and somehow comes out worse….. Nobody took the words away here. They left the headword, the little italic n. underneath it, the measured white space where a meaning is supposed to go, and then declined to put anything in the space. The word stays fully dressed. There’s just nothing inside the coat.
The thing about Jarlic that I keep turning over is that it works. It lands! It really lands! You shove the two halves together and a real jar of real garlic waits at the far end of it so the momentum you describe does arrive somewhere eventually. What put the fear in me was the reverse case. A word everyone treats as full that not one person can cash out. Not racing toward meaning. Already wearing the look of having meant something, with nothing standing behind the look.
And no, I never spoke to Syme. You can’t, by the end. That’s rather the point of him.
Thank you, Adam, for going down into the slip drawers with me instead of skating over them! That basement was the part I was sure would put people to sleep, and you went and called it the liveliest thing on the floor. How delightful!!!
There is something of a malformed idea coming to mind, as you pushed back on Syme’s preference for subtraction in his eleventh edition versus the version Mrs Aldous (ahem, don’t think I didn’t see you trying to open our doors of perception to your brave new world) helped form with phantom errata forms. Whether you are affixing a completely non-interoperable meaning to a word or if you are giving it the pristine white space of complete silence in the definition section under the head word and its grammatical designation, they both amount to the same thing: you are manipulating reality. Which we all do to some extent, to stave off entropy. But through language we are at our most human trying to use symbols to make sense of the world — opening a space for thoughts or constraining them to the extreme degree has an inorganic impact on how we can use language to alter reality with severe consequences.
The reason I call the idea malformed is that I somehow put both your characters and Orwell’s into the role of propagandists and it felt right… which was my first worry!
Anyway, I wonder if you have it in your bring form to this half-baked idea!
First, yes! You caught it. Mrs Aldous is Aldous on purpose, and you’ve got your finger right on the smuggling. And I knew you’d say something. Orwell’s fear was scarcity, the boot, the word taken off you. Huxley’s was the soft version, where they hand you so much comfort you stop caring what’s true. The blank word is the Huxley road. Nobody is deprived of it. They are handed it for nothing, it’s pleasant to hold, and Mrs Aldous’s shrug is soma made out of paperwork. So the two dystopias you felt sliding into each other were both already in the room. I just kept one of them under a surname.
Now the half-baked part, which isn’t. You cast everyone as a propagandist and then flinched, and the flinch is the find. Subtraction and the white space meet because they do the one same thing to a word. They make it impossible to be wrong with. Newspeak burns the words you’d need to even think the dissenting thought. The blank entry leaves the word standing and pulls out the meaning you’d have checked it against. Two different methods. What gets left behind is the same. And a word you can’t be wrong with is the propagandist’s whole kit because propaganda was never really lying. A lie still needs the truth, it has to know what it’s turning over. The pure form skips all that,removes the test that sorts a true word from a false one, and once that’s gone there’s nothing left to lie about, only things to say again. That’s why both casts walked into the same role on you. One gets there by taking words away, the other by leaving the space open, and the silence at the end is the same silence, which is the part that ought to keep us up.
Thank you for handing it to me half-built and trusting me to find the joints! You’d set most of them already. I tightened a couple and pointed at the wall it leans on.
I think I trusted you with the malformed idea because my pause was a protective mechanism. Reading this clarity you shared has left me with a bit of vertigo!
I always had the Huxley/Orwell binary as two avenues to a shared principle: control. One through austerity the other through abundance. The two worlds make this materially salient through dust in pores and soma in bodies… but when you dissolve the two dystopian worlds in the acid of this contention (did I read a short story or a philosophy… does it matter which?) we are left with the fundamental building blocks of cultural meaning: words.
Whether written or said the adjudicators of meaning (I am, now, also on team #Jarlic! I invoked it as silly example… now it has more meaning than I gave it credit for) are in possession of a cataclysmic weapon. The power to mobilize the human organism, and manipulate them en masse to follow a script, secreted in through either constraint or unmitigated openness. But as you say, the outcome is the same… our silence.
That’s the vertigo. Control always struck me as an active process to make something do something. But when I consider your framing the control is done through silencing… a silent space (to think of the antithesis to a certain salon) is where there is no friction. No meeting of ideas to grow and develop into something, though challenging to construct, that can make a difference and upend dangerous trajectories.
Are we living in an age of cacophony where the din is so overwhelming we are, despite the noise, entirely silent? Entirely at the mercy of what passes for modern meaning-making, as we are not, on any level, adding our own voice to the creation of the world we live in?
Dystopia through the shared view of the Orwell/Huxley lens looks unnervingly like the world we are in now. Social media crafting taste. AI generating meaning, most of us in a form of silent coma… dragged along with little to no agency.
If it wasn’t obvious. I am a big fan of your short stories. :)
Story or philosophy. The form was the disguise the whole time. You dress the idea up as a man with a bad back and a basement full of paper slips, so it gets waved past the part of you that braces against being lectured, and by the time you feel the philosophy working it’s already inside the house. So no, it doesn’t matter which. That was the smuggling.
But I would file your word down a little. I don’t think we are silent. We have never talked more. Any one of us can publish in the middle of the night to the whole planet. What’s gone isn’t the speaking. It’s the consequence of it. You say a thing into the feed, the feed takes it, logs it, shows it to a few strangers, and hands you back nothing you could build on. Remember the housing form, where you ticked yes or no about the damp and the box fed into nothing. That’s the whole world now. We aren’t gagged. We are unanswered, which is the stranger fate because a gagged person at least knows they have been stopped. The loud, unreceived one feels busy the entire time they’re being managed.
Which is where your salon line got me, because you’ve put your hand on the only counter I actually trust. Friction needs finitude. A small room and an evening. Few enough faces that a word can be challenged and you have to sit there, watch the challenge land, and answer for it. The feed can’t do that. Scale is the very thing that dissolves the friction because at scale nobody has to hear your reply, they just scroll past it. So the answer to the noise was never more voice. It was a smaller room. The old discomfort of being disagreed with to your face by someone who isn’t going anywhere. The machines flooding a billion feeds can manage nearly everything now. They cannot sit at a table for 3 hours and be argued with, and that limit isn’t the room’s weakness. It’s the whole of its power.
I won’t pretend that scales back up to rescue the world. It doesn’t. But it’s the one place left where a word can still be wrong, and the words that can still be wrong are about the only ones doing any work.
Welcome to TeamJarlic, properly this time! You came in for the stories and stayed to take two dystopias apart with me, and that is the best thing the work has been told. Thank you, Adam!
You aren’t filing my word down, you are giving it a different spin.
We are rendered — despite the noises emanating from our mouths or avatars online — silent in the sense we are not contributing. That’s a horrible inversion: give everyone the ability to say anything at any volume and they think they have a voice, but it is just an orchestra comprising kids with a box and a mallet and a told to drum. The illusion is they are making music, the reality is the adults are in another room, pleased to be rid of attention seekers, but making plans the kids are entirely unaware of.
My use of silence was less about what comes out of our mouths and more what is coming out of our minds to affect the society and reality we occupy… which, even in the din we make, is the equivalent of nothing.
So, to the salon conveners, please continue what you are doing! You might not save the world, but often just trying to doing something meaningful is its own heroic effort. Who knows what that act inspires?
It seems we have uncovered the darker side of The Graile Affair. Is it possible this may become known as The Voss Conspiracy? And how dark do you think it's going to get? Or is it sprine and we just don't see it yet? Obrene doesn't seem to have the gentle simplicity of plenivar. There is something a little more dangerous in its usage - or is that scantled thinking? Hmmm.
Love it! The Voss Conspiracy. You have gone and promoted it from hypothesis, and I think you are close, except a conspiracy wants a culprit and this one hasn’t got one. Nobody decided. The words just got loose and turned out lighter to carry than the real ones, and easy runs downhill on its own.
Here’s what snags me, though. You hear danger in “obrene” that you don’t hear in “plenivar”, and no dictionary told you to. The sound did. That ob at the front is the old Latin for “against”, for “in-the-way-of”, the same prefix hiding under obscure and obstruct. Your ear filed in the meaning the page refused to print. So no, that isn’t scantle thinking. :))) Rather the reverse. It’s evidence the words were never as empty as I kept insisting, because the body goes on assigning sense even when the entry won’t.
How dark does it get? I cut the narrator off before her last sentence finished for a reason.
Thank you, Doc, for setting the two of them side by side and feeling the temperature drop between Graile and this! That drop was the whole reason there’s a second story at all. And I’m so moved you remember that one.
Is it possible the unwitting culprit is Helena Voss herself, whose book, After Meaning: Communication in a Post-Definition Age legitimized the undefinable words that everyone understood by using them?
Voss as the culprit is a good catch, and the unfair part is that she would walk free on the same plea everybody uses. She didn’t invent the words. All she did was write down what was already in other people’s mouths. Which is exactly Mrs Aldous saying the meaning was not her department. Description turns out to be the alibi the whole century runs on. Nobody did it. Everyone only kept a record of it happening.
As for the cut-off sentence, I think she stopped because the only words left to finish it were the blank ones, and she knew that, and couldn’t make herself reach for them.
Glad it stuck with you!! And thank you for the Nat King Cole verdict, which is gentler than the story has any right to.
“Nobody did it. Everyone only kept a record of it happening.”
And that’s why it darkens with every shrug or roll of the eyes! It seems too unimportant until it isn’t.
Precisley!
To quote the immortal Nat King Cole
(though written by Irving Gordon), “Unforgettable!”
Wonder what the narrator would have said had you not cut her off? Another thread in The Voss Conspiracy?
Peter Wessel Zapffe
Yes! He belongs over the whole thing. Except the blank word works more silently than the four he listed. Anchoring, distraction and the rest all fence the dread off and leave it sitting there behind the fence, still intact. The empty word does one better than that. It removes the very thing consciousness would have had to wrestle with, so there’s no anguish of meaning left to guard against because there’s no meaning. A fixed point that holds nothing. His relief, without the bother of having to fasten yourself to something real.
The part that would have got to him is the niece. He wanted the species to stop handing its surplus awareness down the line. Here it hands the sedative down instead, parent to child, and files it under school.
Thank you for mentioning him! I had totally forgotten Zapffe.
Strange. I had looked up the correct word then transformed it in my memory.
I’m watching the film Camille Claudel 1915. I had only seen the much earlier film before, about her time of seeing and feeling in the time of her creations. I have to understand it with subtitles. Sometimes I think I only see you with subtitles which is my loss. Yet, I can feel Camille even if this film is purely fiction.
I’m wondering if the truly sane appear to be insane to those that do not fully observe and feel the world around them.
No need to reply. You have provided me with copious replies already that I’m still ingesting, like eating food slowly to fully taste the food.
I wonder if someone like you existed a hundred years ago could have been condemned as insane as was Camille.
Probably I told you before, but I am obsessed with Camille Claudel. You felt her through a language you don’t have, in a film about a woman gone a hundred years, and she reached you all the same. The subtitle was not the loss. The feeling got across whole. And everyone reads everyone this way. Even in your own tongue you only ever get the words, never the thing in the other head that the words are standing in for. The complete version you think you miss was never on the table for anyone.
Whether a person gets called mad, though. I don’t think the verdict was ever really about Camille’s perception. It was about who held the pen. Her brother and her mother could sign the paper and she couldn’t sign her way back out. The label tracked the authority. The seeing barely came into it. So the real question isn’t whether the clear-eyed look insane to the half-asleep. Sometimes they do. It’s who happens to be nearer the door when a signature is wanted.
Thank you for setting me beside Camille. But she paid for her seeing. I only get to write about people who did.
Was it here or another writing you used the word ‘pomfeed’. I stopped there because I didn’t know that word growing up and living in the Sonoran Desert. I looked it up and had sense of why you chose it, knowing I could be wrong. So instead of understanding exactly I went with how I felt it knowing that I could not fully explain what I felt and now have let it go.
As I type this with one finger I’m realizing that to read you trying to understand every nuance is blocking the more important of just feeling what you wrote. Of course I realize what I feel is created by myriad experiences within my own life.
And the missing words actually amplify the feeling and not the understanding.
It was here, and the word was Pomfret. You’ve kept him in your memory as pomfeed, which I had to read twice, because that’s the whole story happening inside a single reader. You met a word you didn’t grow up with, never pinned it, and the version that stayed with you came out a little altered. Obrene would be proud. Pomfret less so. He was a complainer.
What you call just feeling it was understanding. The older sort, the sort that runs ahead of the dictionary and is mostly right. You felt the man was tired and put-upon, the type who tells you about his back, and that’s everything the name had to carry. The lookup adds nothing.
Here’s the line I don’t want you to walk past, though. Your feeling worked because Pomfret had a back that actually hurt. There was a made thing waiting on the far side of the word for the feeling to land on. That’s what separates him from obrene, where nothing waits behind the feeling at all, and that absence is the point where feeling without meaning turns into the trap. Your instinct was sound because the word had a man standing behind it.
Thank you for spending all those one-fingered keystrokes on a stranger’s story, and on about the most honest thing anyone’s told me about how to read one.
Tamara, how convincingly you turned an absence into a functioning social system. The blank definitions behave like real institutional tools, spreading through meetings, forms, schools, and marriages with a logic that feels disturbingly plausible. That is a remarkable achievement because the story never relies on spectacle, only on the accumulation of small, believable compromises.
One detail that I find quite amazing. Edge reading the entire Eleventh in search of a single intact definition. In a story full of ambiguity, that small act of stubborn verification becomes unexpectedly moving. It gives the narrative an emotional anchor and reminds us that resistance often begins with something as simple as checking whether the record still matches reality.
Professions change their standards to accommodate the blank words. Imagine engineers, doctors, or architects beginning to use them in reports because the undefined terms provide protection from accountability. At that point the words would no longer just obscure meaning. They would become a kind of social insurance policy against being wrong. That would deepen the story’s central insight that the erosion of language persists. Uncertainty can become more convenient than precision.
The final paragraphs are very strong because they refuse a simple conspiracy. The observation that “easier is a current” captures something larger than the setting and gives your story its lasting weight. It is ostensibly about language, but what it really examines is the human preference for frictionless thinking, and it does so with impressive restraint.
Tamara, this is as incredible as “The Graille Affair” you recently published.
The insurance reading is correct, and I want to shove it one step further into the cold. A blank word shields you from the blame. It does nothing whatever about the wall. The damp still comes through, the report still ticks a box that feeds into nothing, and somewhere down the line the thing a doctor or a surveyor signed off on behaves exactly as physics insists it should, no matter which undefined term sat in the file. So the policy pays out in one currency only, the avoidance of fault, while the world goes on charging in the other. That gap is where the harm sits. It is a wide gap. It widens.
I’m glad Edge reached you because he’s the one I couldn’t bring myself to write coldly. There’s a crueller thing folded under his search that I only implied. Suppose he had found his single intact definition. It would have proved nothing. One proper entry in a book of blanks doesn’t read as the rule the rest betrayed. It feels it’s the error. The whole order had already swapped over which kind of word needs explaining, so in a place built on empty entries, meaning is the anomaly. It’s the thing someone forgot to leave out. He was hunting for evidence the new world would have filed under mistake.
That this sits beside Graile for you matters, since the pair were never meant to be read apart. Thank you for tracking the small compromises instead of asking the story to hand you a villain, Alexander! There wasn’t one to give.
Allow me to say that all your stories are memorable. As well as your formidable characters.
This is brilliant because it understands something most political dystopias miss, that language does not collapse when words are forbidden but when words become infinitely elastic.
The Eleventh Edition feels like a forensic report on the present. Today we are surrounded by terms that function exactly as “obrene” does in the story, words invoked with absolute certainty and almost no agreed definition. Everyone is expected to use them, few can define them, and asking for clarification is treated as a moral failure. The result is a culture where fluency increasingly outranks understanding. We no longer ask, “What does this mean?” but “Do I know how to deploy it?” The niece’s observation may be the most chilling line in the story because it captures the modern condition perfectly. Language becomes a badge of belonging rather than a tool for thought.
I love that you never point at the reader and announce the lesson. You simply leave the blank space on the page and trust us to notice how many of our own words have already begun to resemble it. That is far harder, and far more powerful, than satire. Tamara — the wordsmith.
The forbidden-versus-elastic distinction is the one I most wanted someone to walk straight up to, and there’s a part of it that only shows itself once you sit a while. A banned word leaves a hole the exact shape of what was taken. You can feel the edge of it. People smuggle the word back, scrawl it on walls. They build an underground around the missing thing because prohibition at least hands you something to push against and something to put back. The elastic word leaves no hole. Nothing was removed. It sits there fully present and completely hollow, so there’s no edge to find your fingers on and no one to be a dissident about. You can’t run a résistance for a definition that was never written. That’s why my version outlasts the Orwell one. Edge can read the whole book and there’s simply nothing for him to restore.
Your reading also showed me the niece might not be the future. She could be the older state of things coming back. People recited oaths and prayers they couldn’t parse for most of recorded time. The odd interval was the one where we expected a word to be a window with a verified thing on the far side of it, and we keep calling its end a decline because we took the exception for the rule.
Thank you, Clara, for not wanting the moral pinned to the page, and for treating the blank space as the argument instead of a hole in it! The space was doing the work. You let it.
Brilliant as always. Or maybe we should invent a new word only for you, Tamara?
That could be fun!
It's interesting how "obrene" is very close to "obscene", and is used as such in the story, or at least, as something close to "offensive". Beyond how the word is used, questioning its use is also treated as "obscene", in this world where looking for definitions in blank spaces becomes a form of blasphemy.
Many people don't realize that this is the origin of the term "political correctness", which doesn't mean polite or progressive, but something that is "politically" correct, as opposed to being actually correct. It was meant to identify instances where something must be accepted for political reasons, whether it's true or not. Similarly, "obrene", once it became common parlance, no longer needed a definition, only correct contextual use, hence why people were taught how to use it, not what it meant.
In the same way that the Stalinist flavor of political correctness had nothing to do with truth, the use of "obrene" has nothing to do with meaning; it becomes a signal of conformity and obedience. More important than conveying information, its usage was about conveying civilizational allegiance, or on a less grand scale, upholding the social contract. The word itself rests on two separate planes of existence, one as a meaningless blank entry in The Eleventh Edition, and the other as a final word or coda to signify full acceptance of the status quo.
This was brilliant, Tamara. On the surface, it's a commentary on how words can mean whatever we want them to mean, and how equivocations, however incorrect, become functional. But you've gone beneath the surface to map out something deeper: that the definitions of words are far less relevant to how they are used, and that most of us communicate based on the latter, unwittingly or not, to signify and secure our place in the tribe.
There’s a reading of “obscene”, contested but hard to let go of, that traces it to “ob scaena”, off the stage, the thing not to be shown to the audience. So when this world starts treating the question as obscene, it’s shoving the question into the wings. Not the answer. The asking. The act of crouching down to look under the word is the part that gets pulled behind the curtain.
And the tribe point you land on has a very old ancestor. The “shibboleth”, in Judges, was a word nobody cared to define. Ear of corn, or a flood, depending which gloss you trust. The men of Gilead used it at the fords and the test had nothing to do with what it named. You said it right or you said it wrong, and if you said it wrong, sibboleth, they killed you on the riverbank. The content was dead weight. The pronunciation carried the whole verdict. That’s some 3,000 years ahead of anyone needing the phrase political correctness, and it’s the same engine turning over, a word kept hollow on purpose so it can do the one task a defined word can’t, sorting who belongs from who doesn’t, on the spot, with no appeal.
A definition would only get in the way. You can argue with a meaning, pick at it, ask for the page reference. A password hasn’t got a page. You produce it or you don’t.
Andrew, thank you for dragging the Stalinist sense of the term into the open, since it’s the piece nearly everyone skips, and for seeing the two planes….. though I’d press you on one thing. They aren’t quite separate. The blank is what qualifies the word for the job.
You're right - the blank IS the function. Brilliant.
This is extraordinary work, Tamara. Is this a story about convenience? I think it is. That is far more unsettling. The blank definitions are frightening, but the real masterpiece is the gradual revelation that nobody is forced to surrender meaning. They volunteer it because precision is exhausting and ambiguity is comfortable.
Reading this reminded me of a board meeting years ago where a proposed strategy survived six hours of scrutiny without anyone ever defining what success would actually look like. The presentation was full of polished words: “alignment”, “synergy”, “transformation”, and everyone left satisfied. A month later, I realized those terms had functioned exactly like obrene. They created the feeling of agreement without the burden of agreement itself. The room had been full of intelligent people, yet the emptier the language became, the smoother the conversation flowed. That frightened me more than any outright lie could have.
One detail I kept thinking about afterward. I wonder if there were people who began collecting private definitions in secret notebooks to preserve their own meaning. Little underground dictionaries where a husband, a teacher, a mechanic, a child each wrote what words meant to them before the blanks arrived. Over time, those notebooks would become more valuable than the Eleventh Edition itself since they represented the last stubborn refusal to let language become communal fog.
The achievement here is the precision of the narrator’s voice. It never raises its voice, never performs outrage, never explains more than it must. The calmness becomes the horror. By the end, the blank space under “obrene” feels less like a missing definition than a mirror held up to every institution, relationship, and conversation that survives on words nobody has bothered to interrogate. That is remarkably difficult to pull off, and you do it with such confidence that the story feels less invented than remembered. I loved it.
Convenience, yes! That’s the right name for it, and the unflattering part is that it never feels like surrender while you are inside it. It feels like good sense. Your board meeting is a cleaner specimen than anything I made up since nobody in that room was lying and nobody was forced and it happened regardless. The empty words were what let the meeting end before midnight. Precision would have started a fight, turned the 6 hours into 12, sent you all home agreeing on nothing. So the hollow language was performing a service. That’s the part that doesn’t sleep at night.
The secret notebooks undid me a little, and I want to walk them somewhere sadder than where you set them down. A private definition is nearer to a diary. Meaning is the one thing you can’t hoard, because it only lives in the gap between two people who happen to agree. The husband writes what obrene meant to him, the teacher writes hers, and each feels they’ve rescued something. Then one night they lay the pages side by side and find the entries don’t match, never quite did, and the comparing is what tells them so. The underground wouldn’t preserve a single lost tongue. It would splinter into a notebook’s worth of private ones, each warm to its keeper and no use to anyone else. A recipe survives a drawer like that. A meaning won’t.
Thank you for carrying in the board room, Céline! It proved the story better than the story manages on its own.
“In the beginning was the Word,...and the Word was God….The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us….” (John 1:1-14)
Through sheer obstinacy, I am a definition miner. Sporadic, but insistent. But I like to think I look words up if I’m not familiar with them and can’t make any sense of them in the context of the sentence. Words, it seems, are like little deities, a bit like burning bushes, pronouncing themselves into being and into a vernacular. They not only reveal phenomenological secrets, they act as communal support stakes. They are meaning links, helping minds join hands together. Even so, as with burning bushes they are subject to many interpretive pitfalls. The links are not so much chain-like as they are little Vinn diagrams staking out common ground. Two or more minds encircle some shared meaning, while much elastic dissonance remains in each mind’s contextual background. Words point, within certain constraints. They burn the bush, and still fail to ignite the listener’s mind at times. That is, they don’t always land perfectly.
Even though I strive for understanding and precise application, a devout word miner like me has only looked up what, maybe a few hundred, a thousand? words in my lifetime. Thousands more must become flesh through trial and error. And that works pretty well on the whole. As often as not words are shaped by running a gauntlet of fiat parlance, floating on faint clouds of trust, decoupled from the gold standard of their given lexicography. This may partly explain why Mrs Aldous is so nonchalant about the blank space left by the Eleventh Edition errata words. Experience assures her that ‘obrene’, and the others, will still become flesh through circulation. Words preen for attention like gods. Some catch feelings and stick. And if the public accepts them, they dwell well among us.
That is how the errata words of the Eleventh Edition operate as well. With fewer initial constraints than their defined counterparts, they are freer to mutate and search out a center. But like all words, fiat meanings eventually flesh themselves out through usage.
Take the word ‘jarlic.’ Now there’s a word that may hold if parlance gives it legs. (God knows it could also show up in a slop essay one day with an entirely new usage as some LLM grabs it from obscurity and revitalizes it: “Mom! Junior is jarlicing the honey again.” (LLM’s are not as smart as they pretend to be!)) Otherwise, it will rise briefly like a bubble in a boiling roil, then return forgotten to the water from which it appeared. It all comes down to its fiat force.
In other words, fiat words, like the Robert Ryman installation, earn more weight than simple vacuity would seem to postulate. The canvases hang in a similar generative state of fluidity, for sure. Presumable, each viewer will fill them with their own imaginative life, and as those revelations become flesh, parlance will shape them into a local vernacular. Like cloud shapes, the blank canvas can propagate multiple projections which solidify into something durable through sharing.
You have quoted the one incarnation that argues against you, I think. The Word in John takes flesh once. A single body, in one place, that people could stand beside and point at and argue over with the same man in front of them. That is what a shared meaning actually needs, a body everyone is looking at together. The blank word does the reverse. It takes flesh in every mouth and never the same flesh twice. Not one incarnation. A thousand private ones that never get into the same room. Your own Venn diagram gives the game away. With a real word the circles overlap so far that the shared patch is most of the figure and the dissonance sits out at the rim. Obrene’s two circles barely kiss. The overlap is a sliver, the rest of the page stays unshaded, and the whole wager of the story is only that the sliver keeps thinning, because nothing holds it, until the circles slide off each other entirely. That drift is where the marriage ends. The tribunal sits inside it too. So does the wet wall and the box that fed into nothing.
I think choosing Ryman was the strongest move because the white paintings aren’t vacant and the man would have loathed the word. He was a fanatic about their matter. The exact white, the weave of the support, the fasteners, the edge, the particular wall and the light coming across it. He took the depicted thing out and then poured everything into the surface and the making, so the canvas pays back the closest looking you can give it. The blank entry punishes that same looking. Edge looked closer than anyone alive and came away with nothing because nothing had been made there to find. A Ryman viewer in front of all that white stands before a thing somebody laboured over. A speaker reaching for obrene looks into a mirror with the silvering scraped off. One is generous. The other only does a passable impression of it, and from the right angle you can’t tell the two apart, which is more or less the entire problem.
The fiat line is clever, yet fiat money floats free of gold, yes, but it holds because one bank stands behind it and everyone keeps the same ledger. The blank word has no bank. Each speaker mints his own note down in the cellar and calls it legal tender, and when two notes meet and don’t match you get the tribunal working out afterward what the note was worth, by whoever happened to stand nearer the door.
(And Junior jarlicing the honey is a better sentence than half of what reaches print.)
Dear Andrew, thank you for the most theological thing anyone’s set down under this story! You came to bless the void and built the sharpest case against it I’ve been handed. I’m keeping hold of the argument. Whether I’m winning it tonight, I haven’t decided.
I’m not sure where to begin. Ever since I discovered your writing, I’ve been praising you so much that I’m afraid my comments might start to sound mechanical. But I’ll still try.
I loved it instantly on the first read. Then I took a break and came back to it an hour later. I loved it even more. I missed some subtleties the first time. It was very rewarding. I’ve never written anything like this. All of your writing reminds me that I still have a long way to go before I can truly call myself a writer. You moved me. I hope that someday I can make a reader feel the same thing like what you made me feel today. Long live!
Don’t worry about the mechanical thing! A machine wouldn’t take the hour’s break and come back. It wouldn’t notice it had walked past something the first time. That returning, and finding more on the second pass than the first, is the part to keep an eye on in yourself because it’s the writer’s faculty that shows up before any of the others do. You can only lay a second layer into your own pages if you are the sort of reader who reaches for one in everybody else’s. So the thing you hand me is actually a piece of your own equipment.
And the long way to go doesn’t go away, by the way. Every writer worth reading still feels it out in front of them. The ones who decide they have arrived are the ones who stop being worth the trouble. That distance you stand in isn’t proof you aren’t a writer yet but the room writers do the work in.
Thank you, Prashanth, for coming back! Most things never get the second read, and the second read is where you actually met the story. Long live yourself! I am grateful to have readers like you.
brilliant, obviously!
Thank you so much, Ivy!
The most unsettling moment is that she knew what her husband meant, without knowing what the word meant. The story never really leaves that distinction.
It’s the one spot in the whole story where an empty word lands perfectly. Everywhere else the blanks make fog; between those two it carried clean, no loss at all. That’s the worse news because it means the word was never the part doing the work. He reached her by tone and timing, and by all those years in the same kitchen, and the blank word was only the thing his meaning rode in on. The emptiness didn’t fail there. It showed how little the meaning had ever been needed.
Thank you for halting on that exact sentence. It’s the one I would defend last.
"Not what the word meant. What he meant by it. Which is not the same." Yup.
Our love of quirky words; is it a blessing or a curse? Who needs quirky words anyway? Idle poets? I sprinkle them on my word salads. How can I use “obrene” if I can’t look it up? (I love this essay, like tumbling down the ski hill after falling and coming up smiling.)
Haitian Creole has a lot of quirky words. I discovered you can translate whole pages of almost any language, including Haitian Creole, into almost any language instantly with Translate King, free from Google. I translated a beautiful Haitian Creole song, a mother singing to her infant, into English, up to now available only in Haitian Creole. Then I covered the song using Suno AI:
https://suno.com/s/lTjPo0h6GIJT4bGQ
Until I understood the words I was just a dumb but admiring spectator. Now I feel much closer to the Haitians simply because I understand the words. I loftily said to my parents when I chose my journalism major 50+ years ago, “Words are as cosmically significant as numbers.” (Dad was skeptical but he came around.) I’m in a quiet corner of McDonalds on my bike ride break. Tamara’s essays - “I’m lovin’ it”.
“Obrene” is the one word you are now completely free to use, since there’s nothing to look up there’s no way to get it wrong. You’re pre-qualified. Sprinkle it on the salad! :)
But here’s what your Haitian Creole adventure does that the poor souls in my story never manage. You went after a meaning and you actually caught one, and rather than leaving you stranded it walked you up close to a whole roomful of people you’d only been nodding at from the back. That’s the blank word run backwards. The empty one shuts you out. A translated lullaby crossed an ocean. Edge spent a year hunting a meaning that was never in the book to begin with. You went hunting one that was sitting right there in another language, and it answered, in a mother’s voice no less.
And your journalism-major self was right, Douglas! The lullaby is the proof your dad would have to fold on now. A number can do nearly everything. It can’t sing a baby down in a tongue you don’t speak.
Thank you for the dispatch from the corner of McDonald’s, and for the ski-hill line, which is the most cheerful thing anyone’s said about reading me!
Tears of acknowledgment come often as I read what you write….what a blessing you are to us.
You made me emotional now….
I'm an advocate of LLMs but this comment feels heavily processed by AI, not polished. The irony is to find such comment on a post about habit taking over meaning. Perhaps, these post are the norm now. This is so obrene-esque!
I assure you it’s heavily polished, with McDonald’s mustard (yellow journalism).