what?

today i learned something shocking/horrifying/fascinating: map makers add in cities and streets that don't exist, as a gaurd against plagiarism! the makers of dictionaries put in a false word! i understand the threat that plagiarism poses to cartographers and lexicographers, but these are REFERENCE MATERIALS. i'm not looking for Truth or moral absolutes, but christ, the dictionary! also, i want to know the words, the fake ones, so bad. i want a list of them.

also, let's say that a group of lexicographers suspect that their dictionary has been plagiarized. they say 'ha! look here! you've included this fake word, which we made up! you're clearly in violation of copyright!' how do they prove that it's not a real word? it's in their dictionary! maybe because it's not in OTHER dictionaries? but dictionaries must, as a rule, include different words or there would only be one kind of dictionary.

my mind is fucking boggled.

turning over a new one.

food, conversation and the internet are generally my preferred procrastination methods, but i've decided to substitute masterbation for all of them. starting now.

if and as it could.

there was not a soul there but knew how shallow-rooted the whole town was. it flooded yearly, and had burned once. often enough the lumber mill shut down, or burned down. there were reports that things were otherwise elsewhere, and anyone, on a melancholy evening, might feel that fingerbone was a meager and difficult place.

so a diaspora threatened always. and there is no living creature, though the whims of eons had put its eyes on boggling stalks and clampled it in a carapace, dimished it to a pinpoint and given it a taste for mud and stuck it down a well or hid it under a stone, but that creature will live on if it can. so fingerbone, which despite all its difficultes sometimes seemed pleasant and ordinary, would value itelf, too, and live on if and as it could. so every wanderer whose presence suggested it might be as well to drift, or it could not matter much, was met with something that seemed at first sight a moral reaction, since morality is a check upon the strongest temptations.

marilynne robinson
housekeeping