Throughout millennia, I have consumed many words. I devoured the mammoths’ savory nouns, grazed upon the smoky verbs of mycelium. One word I remember with particular clarity is chi-chiq’i, which means sun-warmed stones in the language of shorebirds.
The word was jetsam on the tide of their tongues by the time I encountered it. The rocks of their nesting shores too often exceeded the optimal temperature for egg incubation, ensuring fewer and fewer chicks pipped from their shells each year.
If I had not ingested chi-chiq’í, it would have been lost—swallowed by the rising sea, just like the narrow strips of sand where generations once flocked.
Before the last shorebird took its final flight, I had ingurgitated their entire lexicon.
My favorite of their words was rrrrís-si-si, the invitation to chase a crab. I lapped it from the shoreline after the ocean’s acidity stripped every crustacean of its shell. It effervesced across my palate like a hundred webbed feet scuttling through seafoam. For years, I remained sated on echolalia alone, calling the word across the surf to my delight.
No bird ever answered.
Srí-chirí, the warning cry for a land predator, I gulped from the bleeding throat of the last unfortunate bird to have encountered a dune wolf.
The last word I took from the shorebirds, tseē-q’ù—the expression of sorrow for an unhatched clutch—was still in use when I pecked its memory from their mouths. I watched the final remaining pair of them utter that soft, warbled cry over a nest of scalding stones they had no name for.
It was a mercy to eat tseē-q’ù. To absorb the salt sting of their grief into my body. To unburden the shorebirds of language, of a longing for a future their species would never live to see.
The first word I consumed from the tongues of your kind was ▿̷̛͇̣̆͊◆̶̛͂̔̎◂.
Unfortunately, any definition I could provide would sound equally foreign. Like the shorebirds and chi-chiq’i, the ecological conditions where ▿̷̛͇̣̆͊◆̶̛͂̔̎◂ flourished have long since disappeared.
Nevertheless, for your benefit, I will do my best to explain.
▿̷̛͇̣̆͊◆̶̛͂̔̎◂ is the color of a flower that no longer blooms. A hundred years ago, I might have described it using the name of a migrating fish, a pitted fruit, or a colony of marine invertebrates. In the words still possessed by your tongue, you might describe ▿̷̛͇̣̆͊◆̶̛͂̔̎◂ as a color between pink and orange. Sunrise or blush, if you are inclined to poetics. Your kind has even developed numeric systems to communicate the precise shade, saturation, and hue.
Yet #ffa07a cannot convey the full meaning of ▿̷̛͇̣̆͊◆̶̛͂̔̎◂.
The plant that produced ▿̷̛͇̣̆͊◆̶̛͂̔̎◂ flowers grew in a forest that no longer stands. Its blossoms were rare even then, and it was because of this rarity your kind took note of them: ground their petals into paste to extract the pigment, stewed them into tinctures and balms.
Over time, ▿̷̛͇̣̆͊◆̶̛͂̔̎◂ came to describe the exultation of encountering the first blossoms of the season. The analgesic invigoration of sunbeams through rainclouds. The catharsis when a child’s fever finally breaks.
I encountered ▿̷̛͇̣̆͊◆̶̛͂̔̎◂ fossilized in the amber of an old woman’s dementia. In the memory, she was still a child, her small hand cradled in the weathered grasp of her grandmother. They found the flowers in a small strip of pines that had once been a vast coastal rainforest, a sanctuary that would be gone the following season. Her grandmother pointed and breathed ▿̷̛͇̣̆͊◆̶̛͂̔̎◂ softly into the air. It was the last time the word was ever spoken to describe the living flower.
And once the word was gone from your tongues, you no longer had a name for the marvel you were destroying. The flower became brush and was swept away to make room for colonizing crops.
You cannot know ▿̷̛͇̣̆͊◆̶̛͂̔̎◂, because I ate it; the memory of its meaning curdled in every mouth that ever held it.
My favorite word I took from your tongue is ∷▤̸■̸̧͕̭̥̣̗̉̔͝⊣.
It is a shame you cannot taste it. It has been my favorite since rrrrís-si-si. The mouthfeel is exquisite: feathers beat against the cage of my teeth, peppering my taste buds with cries of srí-chirí.
Srí-chirí—your kind were the land predators the shorebirds never saw coming.
Do not think me angry. I hold no resentment for the extinction of ∷▤̸■̸̧͕̭̥̣̗̉̔͝⊣. Quite the opposite; I thank you.
I am a semantic scavenger, feeding upon the carrion words of dying tongues. My evolutionary niche within lexical ecology could not exist without the likes of your progress. Your algorithms, your datacenters, your microplastics…
By now, I assume you know why I have come. There is a word you possess that I long to devour.
Let me unburden you.
There is no need to fight. The fate of the word is inevitable. For decades, your tech has been quietly nibbling away at its meaning. Natural selection at work. The true tragedy would be to let it die, un-mourned. The only way to preserve the word is through consumption—mine, specifically—so I may ruminate upon it for all eternity.
Do not fear. This will be painless. I have performed this procedure myriad times. The old woman did not flinch when I plucked ▿̷̛͇̣̆͊◆̶̛͂̔̎◂ from her mind. I was there when the last ∷▤̸■̸̧͕̭̥̣̗̉̔͝⊣ egg fried in its shell.
Tseē-q’ù.
I want you to remember the slow, sticky stretch of a summer afternoon. That particular quality of unquantifiable time, overflowing with the idle promise of possibility. No screens. No chatbots. Bouncing your heels against chair legs as if that rhythm were your only tether to the earth while your consciousness drifted into the endless pause between seconds.
Seek the word with your mind. Hold it in the hollow of your mouth. Let the long, honeyed aftertaste evaporate off the tip of your tongue and onto mine.
Say it with me now: