Chapter 13

Escaping words

In July 2017 a writer named Alexandra Rowland posted nine words on Tumblr: "The opposite of grimdark is hopepunk. Pass it on." People passed it on. Within two years and a season the word stood on the Collins Word of the Year shortlist with a lexicographer's definition attached, "a literary and artistic movement that celebrates the pursuit of positive aims in the face of adversity," and today hopepunk is a standing headword in the Collins English Dictionary (Rowland 2017; Collins 2019; Collins English Dictionary n.d.). No grammar, no textbook, no institution, no membership. A word that named something people already felt crossed from a joke on a fan blog to the reference shelf, and it made the whole trip alone.

That is how language actually travels, and this chapter is about the kind of success it makes possible for Phi. But the honest way in is through the ambition Phi turns down first.

The ambition refused

Phi's founding protocol says it in one sentence: the language "is not intended as a universal auxiliary language." Chapter 6 buried the century of projects that intended exactly that, and the mechanism of their deaths can be carried in a pocket. Universal ambition walks a language into great-power politics, where a single veto can end a decade of work. Network effects hand every contest to the incumbent, which is why the second-best world language is English and the third-best is also English. And a language for everyone must file away the values that made it worth wanting, because every refusal offends some constituency of everyone. Phi would have to surrender the sun's stations, the unpriced day, and half its reasons for existing at the door of the auxiliary job interview. It declines the interview.

How words escape

In 1920 Karel Čapek was writing a play about artificial workers and did not like his own name for them. He had Labori, from the Latin, and it struck him as "a bit bookish." He took the problem to his brother Josef, a painter, who was working at an easel, and thirteen years later Karel published the scene himself: "'Then call them Robots,' the painter muttered, brush in mouth, and went on painting" (Čapek 1933). The word came from robota, the old Czech for forced labor. The play, R.U.R., had its seasons and closed. The word never closed. It escaped Czech, escaped the theater, escaped the brothers entirely, and now reports for work in language after language, doing exactly the job Josef hired it for.

Half a century later a biologist did it on purpose. Richard Dawkins needed "a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission" and engineered one in public view: "'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'... it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory', or to the French word même" (Dawkins 1976). Every design consideration is on the page, sound shape, kinship to an existing word, a mnemonic escape hatch. The word then left the book so completely that most of the people who use it daily have never heard of the soup of human culture it was coined to describe. An escaped word owes its parent nothing. That is the price and the proof of the escape.

Solarpunk itself made the same trip on the timeline chapter 12 walked, an anonymous blog post to an encyclopedia entry. Hopepunk made it faster. The pattern under all four is one pattern: a word escapes when it names something people already feel, in a shape short enough to hand over whole, and the handing over is the entire mechanism. Rowland's nine words contained the product and the distribution plan.

The missile warning

One escape went badly, and its lesson is worth the whole cautionary literature. The French degrowth movement launched its banner word deliberately, a projectile fired into public debate to force the growth question open, and the word behaved like the projectile it was. Drews and Antal, whose paper wears the tactic in its title, argue that "degrowth" sets a listener against it before the first argument arrives, on three grounds: the word points down, and the deep metaphor that up is good and down is bad turns a listener's first feeling; strangers hear it as a demand for recession, whatever its advocates mean; and every repetition re-sounds the growth frame it opposes (Drews and Antal 2016). Their conclusion stays measured, the word "might be" a liability, but the design lesson does not need the hedge. A word carries its frame in its own body. A word built as a weapon asks to be received as one, and a movement can spend twenty years paying the interest on one syllable of aggression.

Phi's candidates for escape are chosen with that lesson already applied, because the language's own protocol applied it years ago. Phi coins toward care and away from combat by standing rule. Its words name experiences, not enemies. What follows is the shortlist.

The candidates

womu is home: the dwelling and the belonging fused in one noun, what the protocol calls the dwelling-heart. English "home" has spent decades in listing copy, where it means a house priced for sale. A person moving between rented rooms, trying to build the thing rather than buy it, has a use for a word in which the belonging is not an upgrade but the meaning.

korua thero is anger, literally heart-fire. The compound registry states its design in one line: the image "places anger in inward heat without assigning moral character to the person who feels it." English struggles here; its anger words arrive pre-loaded with verdicts. A word that lets a person say the fire is lit without confessing to arson is useful in any household, in either language.

thiku nila is contempt, literally to see small, and the registry again says why it travels well: contempt "appears as a manner of seeing rather than a property of the person seen." Chapter 1 measured what happens to a sentence that points across the room at those people; seeing-small is that gesture's inner life, and English mostly names it from the target's side, as the state of being despised. Phi names the act. To call a comment thiku nila is to say what the speaker's eyes are doing, which is a thing a moderator, a teacher, or a partner can actually point to.

The eight stations of the sun are a set, and sets escape together. A community that wants to un-clock a gathering can already say it meets at norawhi, dusk, and let the sky hold the appointment; the full round from horathe to phoemu gives a day its stations without one glance at a minute. Chapter 2 taught the design; the escape would just be the design in other people's calendars.

And wia., the word this book opened on. The boatman was asked how many, with no custom of payment behind the question, and the bare word sat there refusing to mean a price. As an escaped saying it would do the same work in English: the answer to what an unpriceable thing costs. What was the afternoon with your daughter worth? wia. The question mark and its refusal, in one word.

The greeting is already gone, of course. Chapter 12 sent kia ahead as the word a stranger can use correctly on the first day. Every list of emigrants starts with the one who left first.

Seeds

Chapter 12 ended in the garden, with the caretakers and the gardeners at their work, and this chapter has only added the garden's second act. A garden succeeds inside its fence by tending, and beyond its fence by seeding, and no gardener runs after the seeds to supervise the landing. A Phi word in an English sentence is a seed across the fence: complete, self-carrying, indifferent to whether its parent language ever gains another fluent speaker. If Phi never numbers its speakers beyond one household and a shelf of books, but womu turns up in a stranger's wedding toast and wia. in a stranger's answer to an appraiser, the language will have succeeded the way gardens do.

su lo phelui thalo.
OPT PL word walk.
(May the words walk.)

The blessing validates, which in this project means the machine has checked every word of it against the dictionary. The rest is not the language's to control, and that is the point of the whole chapter. Rowland wrote the only distribution strategy an escaping word has ever needed: pass it on.

References

Čapek, Karel. 1933. O slově robot (About the Word Robot). Lidové noviny, December 24. English translation by Norma Comrada, preserved on the archived Karel Čapek website capek.misto.cz.

Collins. 2019. Collins Word of the Year 2019 shortlist. Collins Dictionary Language Blog, November 7. https://blog.collinsdictionary.com/language-lovers/collins-word-of-the-year-2019-shortlist/.

Collins English Dictionary. n.d. Hopepunk. HarperCollins. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/hopepunk.

Dawkins, Richard. 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chapter 11, "Memes: the new replicators."

Drews, Stefan, and Miklós Antal. 2016. Degrowth: A 'missile word' that backfires? Ecological Economics 126: 182-187. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2016.04.001.

Rowland, Alexandra. 2017. Tumblr post, July. https://ariaste.tumblr.com/post/163500138919/. Her own account of the coinage is in "One Atom of Justice, One Molecule of Mercy, and the Empire of Unsheathed Knives," in the Winter 2019 issue of The Stellar Beacon, the zine at festive.ninja.

Phi sources

The escape candidates are lexicon entries and registry rows: womu, wia, and kia in the lexicon, with the dwelling-heart epithet in the development protocol; korua thero and thiku nila in manual/part7_reference/compounds.md, whose design notes are quoted verbatim. The sun stations are canon's natural-clock ruling, taught in chapter 2. The boatman's wia. scene is the book's cold open, from texts/news_from_nowhere/chapter_02.md. The auxiliary-language refusal is the development protocol's own overview sentence. The closing blessing follows the optative pattern of su taught in the manual's practice chapters and passes python3 scripts/validate_examples.py.