Pip sent a photo of this page from the flea market stall. She included a ;£ in the text. She meant to type ;) but I think her thumb must have slipped.
It felt nice to suddenly have a word for that. Reading Pip’s text, it struck me that all the words I had that approximated cyprine were either associated more with men or with stuff coming out of my nose.
Cyprine in the dictionary of Wittig and Zeig was intended to have linguistic connotations with the island of Cyprus, Aphrodite’s home. It’s a spry and glistening kind of word.
At the time, I texted Pip back: It’s a spry and glistening kind of word.
Pip replied: And you know the gays love an island – cf. Lesbos, cruising, etc.
Are you flirting with me? I had texted.
Are you out at work yet? Pip replied. I had put my phone in my desk drawer and returned to whatever intern task of the day was required.
Wittig and Zeig’s book was brimming. That’s part of what I loved about Pip. We could talk about brims between ourselves, Brims and misunderstandings and their different pressures.
I had looked up cyprine in the Swansby dictionary out of sheer curiosity. It was an idle thought, an idling thought. A scurrilous voyeur kind of thought but also without much hope. I did find it there, but only because the word also describes a variety of a mineral first discovered adjacent to lavas on Mount Vesuvius. Boom clouds and bodies transfixed: yes, that Vesuvius. I will never guess the correct plural of lava right the first time. It does not come easily. What does? Sensu stricto, the breeze might call through the curtains, so I’ll follow its scent and read, yes, multiple laval shifts surge hot and impossible like hands reaching out from rock.
Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary states the mineral cyprine is also known as idocrase. I do craze sometimes, I thought, when the fan was merely stirring the air into something silicate and nacreous, stars or suns peacock-bright outside. ‘Idocrase occurs as crystals in skarn deposits.’ Skarn referred to chemical alteration of a rock via hydrothermal means. The notion here was of hot fluids that had been subjected to contact metamorphism. Hot stuff, and changing out of hardnesses and feet-on-the-groundnesses. I read that cyprine’s crystals could be cut as gemstones. ‘Cut your teeth on this’ always sounded to me like the most violent-hot turn of phrase.
How many serious books and websites did I consult before I went to serious bed with a serious woman? There were diagrams in those books as there might be for DIY furniture construction or jewellery repair. All the books were bought and not from the library. This syllabus was undertaken and taken under with an earnest and terrified sense of revision. I certainly did not have the word cyprine to hand. There’s a pun here but I’m not sure I can make it indelicate-delicate. Pursuit of a word’s meaning or a meaning’s word making me sound a little unhinged.
I read there was a mollusc called the Icelandic cyprine (Arctica islandica), also known as an ocean quahog. Quahog. A bubble of a word, snug and ugly and great. Quahog is a word for saying underwater or with a mouthful. Some words are made for speculative onomatopoeia. Have I ever spelled onomatopoeia correctly on first time of typing? Have I fuck. Onomatoepia is onomatopoeia for mashing your hands unthinkingly but hopefully onto a keyboard.
Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary claims that the Icelandic cyprine is a species of edible clam, which in terms of Wittig’s cyprine word was an excellent suggestion: you can right or wrong the punchlines as you like. I migrated to Wikipedia and found that an individual specimen of Icelandic cyprine was recorded as living for 507 years, which made it ‘the longest-lived non-colonial metazoan whose age was accurately known’. Cyprine and accuracy, mud in your eye: 507 years ago Thomas Wolsey drew up plans for an invasion of France. The article about ancient edible clams specified that ‘it is unknown how long [the specimen] could have lived had it not been collected alive by an expedition in 2006’. I imagined a dredging naval vessel, its bad radio full of that year’s worst hits as they dug up the noble, ancient clam: Fergie’s ‘London Bridge’, JT’s ‘Sexy-Back’, P!nk’s ‘U + Ur Hand’. You should not rake for these things, I thought at the time. I then thought: this job is killing my attention span.
I wondered how you date an edible clam, and other sentences.
There are certain words that have such a pleasing consistency, texture, taste, colour, odour, network, milieu, stance, poise, arch, crane, comfort, peak, trough; limpid, tepid, torpid, torqued, liquid, lacquered, honeyed, latched, thatched, throstle-sungèd, spangled words. The normal pH of these words is between 3.8 and 4.5, so there is some bite to them.
I supposed there was a man with the surname Skene. I supposed there was a man called Bartholin. Glands and ducts named after them, in the same way men name mountains and creatures after themselves. I hoped these men were kind.
I preferred secrete as a hiding verb rather than anything concerned with outwardliness. It is secreted about my person.
Have you ever heard the word Spinnbarkeit? I hadn’t. Why didn’t we all have these words at the tips of our fingers? Who had been stockpiling them?
‘They have an entry for queer bird,’ said Pip, looking up from her dictionary page. ‘But, ah, “Obsolete”. Poor word’s extinct.’
Obsolescence itself was just another beautiful word for a nothinging. Secrete it about your person and pearlgrit your teeth with a new vocabulary.
My office phone rang and I jumped on instinct – Pip did not have the same Pavlovian response to this sound. The peal ricocheted off the surfaces in the office.
‘Don’t—’ I said, but it was pointless. Pip was already there, hand on the receiver and lifting it to her face.
‘Hello,’ she said, and with a brightness that was purely for my benefit. There was only a slight hesitation when she improvised what she should be saying. ‘Mallory’s office phone?’
I watched her expression change. She did not want me to see her concern so she angled her body away from mine as though a glancing blow had turned her shoulder.
I wanted to ask if it was the hoaxer. I wanted to tell her to put down the phone and felt a rush of defensiveness. He was my problem, not hers. He was my threat, my reason for waking up with my heart in my mouth and horror pinching my throat. She was meant to be doodling on her hands or singing in a pub garden or holding me: his cartoon voice and his malice shouldn’t touch her. His words should stop an inch from her ears and wilt in the air.
I realised that I had no words for what I’d do to protect her.