Palimpsest
Oct. 8th, 2010 01:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
A palimpsest is, as everybody knows, a manuscript page that's been reused after scraping off old text.
It's also the outline of an old building that's been torn down on the wall of a formerly connected building.
I tend to use the word in my head to refer to the writing on a used book - like a note I cherish from an unknown young reader of my copy of "Where The Sidewalk Ends" who marked on one page "my favorit pome". (The writing in MY books tends to be phone numbers, recipes, shopping lists, and, from old books, homework assignments. Plus a number of "addresses" where I go from street, city, and state to country, planet, and solar system. But who doesn't do that?)
Is that a transparent enough extension that other people who know the word at all should get it without my having to explain it, or is it a neologism best kept to myself?
It's also the outline of an old building that's been torn down on the wall of a formerly connected building.
I tend to use the word in my head to refer to the writing on a used book - like a note I cherish from an unknown young reader of my copy of "Where The Sidewalk Ends" who marked on one page "my favorit pome". (The writing in MY books tends to be phone numbers, recipes, shopping lists, and, from old books, homework assignments. Plus a number of "addresses" where I go from street, city, and state to country, planet, and solar system. But who doesn't do that?)
Is that a transparent enough extension that other people who know the word at all should get it without my having to explain it, or is it a neologism best kept to myself?
