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Felicity Martin's avatar

This is a tour de force. I expect the MAGA leadership to be the first to break their own directives, but - of course - they’ll deem that okay because it’ll be while aggressively denigrating others.

Mike Small's avatar

aw thanks Felicity

Mairi McFadyen's avatar

Love this Mike! We need to make loads of analogue zines and counter-flood the zone with all the beautiful delicious words

Mike Small's avatar

Thanks! Yes to the above. I’m thinking about that Maria Fusco’s book where she writes:

“I am for adjectives like beezer, dreich, quare, and nouns like clart, drouth, gleed, mizzle, oxters, scoot-hole, smoor, and verbs like boke, fissle, greet, hunker, swither, and adverbs like furnenst. I am for non-standard English language as a legitimate and enriching form of critical and creative writing which does not take modalities of criticality as given, rather it tends to, and experiments with non-division between practice and theory, criticism and creativity.”

Ruth Reid's avatar

I didn’t know that the lost words was based on an “anti-desecration phrase book” although this makes total sense. I think it’s a seminal text for creative resistance and community, not least because if Musk and his tech bros have their way whole swathes of text will be lost ( and probably are already!). Thank you for a great essay.