Examining the joys and pleasures of the moment is always a worthy inclination, and these days my attention is on The Lexicon Project, an adventure I've been preparing myself for all through the last 80 years or so. The html territory of the Project is under construction, likely to change frequently as more subparts are rounded up and belabored with searchings and readings and writings. Here's how it's gone so far this morning:
and another rendering (the repetition is ...instructive):
..."It wants a better name," said Mark reflectively, "and something distinctive in the poster line. Anyway, I'll have a shot at it."Three weeks later the world was advised of the coming of a new breakfast food, heralded under the resounding name of "Filboid Studge." Spayley put forth no pictures of massive babies springing up with fungus-like rapidity under its forcing influence, or of representatives of the leading nations of the world scrambling with fatuous eagerness for its possession. One huge sombre poster depicted the Damned in Hell suffering a new torment from their inability to get at the Filboid Studge which elegant young fiends held in transparent bowls just beyond their reach.
...No one would have eaten Filboid Studge as a pleasure, but the grim austerity of its advertisement drove housewives in shoals to the grocers' shops to clamour for an immediate supply. In small kitchens solemn pig-tailed daughters helped depressed mothers to perform the primitive ritual of its preparation. On the breakfast-tables of cheerless parlours it was partaken of in silence. Once the womenfolk discovered that it was thoroughly unpalatable, their zeal in forcing it on their households knew no bounds. "You haven't eaten your Filboid Studge!" would be screamed at the appetiteless clerk as he turned weariedly from the breakfast-table, and his evening meal would be prefaced by a warmed-up mess which would be explained as "your Filboid Studge that you didn't eat this morning."
I knew I'd seen that word somewhere, and quickly found its trail:
genizah...a storage area in a Jewish synagogue or cemetery designated for the temporary storage of worn-out Hebrew-language books and papers on religious topics prior to proper cemetery burial (Wikipedia)but invoked by Manul Laphroaig to describe an imagined digital archive:...what might we do, to protect our own books for the long haul? Twelve hundred years from now, as the next civilization is finally printing books and designing computers again after a long, cold night of illiteracy, what treasure trove might we leave for them to print?(and see The Cairo Geniza in the Digital Age: A Webinar with Marina Rustow, from Stanford Libraries)...a thousand years from now, what will be found from our civilization, that ancient land in which every man, woman and child carried a black mirror filled with electronics that no longer function? Well, maybe more than we think. Maybe, just maybe, the next civilization will develop their own computers. Slow ones at first, so let's model them on an Apple ][. And having these slow machines with eight bit processors and limited memory, they might realize that the memory chips they've mined from landfills have degraded, but are often still functional.
...Let's build a geniza of all the text we'd like to preserve, a hundred or so gigabytes worth. All of Wikipedia would consume just tens of gigabytes, and all of Project Gutenberg a little more than six. You can fit this on your laptop. Let's chop these texts into individually legible fragments, where an encyclopedia article might be ten kilobytes and a novel might be four hundred. We want each fragment to be individually meaning- ful, and while some chunks will surely be erased and overwritten, those that survive ought to be easy to re-assemble. Let's write a utility that can summon one or thousands of these fragments on demand
... let's fill all of the spare space in these chips with a geniza for the future. Done right, in the test routines of a major product, one single engineer might seed every landfill in the world with these books, not just in a single generation, but in a single year! And if you are that engineer, I will very happily buy you a beer
- and then another phrase from 60-odd years ago floated out from storage:
to wake a lexicographer .Hmmmm. I thought, maybe I am indeed waking a lexicographer...
My introduction to the phrase was via an article by JD Freeman in Sarawak Museum Gazette (a review of Scott's Iban dictionary, inches away on the shelf...), but its ultimate origin was in Samuel Johnson's Preface to the Dictionary The context is highly relevant to my own activities:
...When first I engaged in this work, I resolved to leave neither words nor things unexamined, and pleased myself with a prospect of the hours which I should revel away in feasts of literature, the obscure recesses of northern learning, which I should enter and ransack, the treasures with which I expected every search into those neglected mines to reward my labour, and the triumph with which I should display my acquisitions to mankind. When I had thus enquired into the original of words, I resolved to show likewise my attention to things; to pierce deep into every science, to enquire the nature of every substance of which I inserted the name, to limit every idea by a definition strictly logical, and exhibit every production of art or nature in an accurate description, that my book might be in place of all other dictionaries whether appellative or technical. But these were the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer. I soon found that it is too late to look for instruments, when the work calls for execution, and that whatever abilities I had brought to my task, with those I must finally perform it. To deliberate whenever I doubted, to enquire whenever I was ignorant, would have protracted the undertaking without end, and, perhaps, without much improvement; for I did not find by my first experiments, that what I had not of my own was easily to be obtained: I saw that one enquiry only gave occasion to another, that book referred to book, that to search was not always to find, and to find was not always to be informed; and that thus to persue perfection, was, like the first inhabitants of Arcadia, to chace the sun, which, when they had reached the hill where he seemed to rest, was still beheld at the same distance from them.- ...which reminded me of the Sarawak Museum's curator when we were there, Tom Harrisson, whose tale is told in The Most Offending Soul Alive: Tom Harrisson and His Remarkable Life. And so various Sarawak thoughts beckon...
A Sea Dyak Dictionary William Howell and DJS Bailey 1900 at wikisource.org ...a yawning crevasse