The public streaming onto the plaza was engulfed by words. At the head of cobbled square, looking haughtily down upon the crowd and surmounted by a brilliant-white cornice of the Imperial style, was the prosept of the National Academy of Letters with its sacerdotal balcony and the little discontinuous wall of planters with arborvitae trimmed into the shape of the Noetic abjad.
The occasion was the pronouncement of the official word for the new devices that were being invented daily that did all sorts of useful calculations and symbolic manipulations. Many were using the prescribed word for unnamed things, sulren, and some variation of the words for information, numbers, text and mixer, or tabular; with many derangements thereof. Others with reddened knuckles resorted to fanciful constructions.
There were arguments. There were many different kinds of devices used for many different purposes, and it wasn’t clear the Academy would treat them all as a category. One knot of commentators by the fountain side of the square, working their intensities up from the whispery, whiskered pronouncements of idle moustache-twisting, came to blows and split each others’ faces along the coarse, leathery grooves of their faces. The one maintained handheld devices were one kind of sulren, larger desktop devices another.
Many in the crowd possessing newer or older variants of the anffer sulartka wielded them, brandished them, ostentatiously did quotidian tasks with them. In the irate disagreements of lots could be heard tense harmonics of envy. A learned bevy with a large encumbrance of such gadgets held forth by the sculpture of Renk the Speech-giver, a little forwards the potters, that a break with existing categories for the sake of distinguishing modernity was asinine, and gave insightful examples of names for each of their countless menagerie couched in terms of pens, paper, abacus beads, tables, pulleys, counters, clocks, and worm-gears. They attracted some acolytes and a space of ignorance about them, which they prized as the moat protecting their intellectual keep.
When upon the balcony appeared the chief Linguist, in attire of the old colonial wallahs, accompanied by the Academy’s presiding officer in a more modern collarless tunic jacket and short neck-beard, the crowd came to attention and instantly contracted. The currents of language and breeze which had wafted amongst them were arrested by their sudden stultifying nearness. The balcony shown with the reflected light of thousands of cast-up faces like a new and voluminous mirror put up into the afternoon light.
The chief Linguist came forward to the balcony whose balustrade he gripped with large, clumsy hands as if to push tumbling off onto the masses. Nothing he could say would be popular instantly, though everyone would repeat it from now on, in speech and print, with the tender, raw sockets of anffer and klinak sulartka healed over and meant nothing more than language scars and snobbish affectation.
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