Palimpsest

[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?

Comments

[steorra]

It's an unobvious extension to me. I'd never met the building sense before, but with both that and the manuscript sense, a key fact is that a palimsest involves the marks of something that used to be there but was removed. For annotations in a used book, that's not normally true, unless someone tried to erase them.

I think I'd describe what you're talking about as marginalia.

[redbird]

I agree with steorra: yours are probably marginalia, or close to, even if they're not literally in the margins but on endpapers.

[conuly]

Glad to have that word, I'll use it in general usage, but it makes these thought-remnants seem so... well, marginal!

[redbird]

I'm still enough of a math geek to associate it with Fermat's last theorem, so called because Fermat wrote in a book that he had found a marvelous proof of that theorem, which the margin was too small to contain. And then went out and got himself killed in a duel. (I don't usually say "got him/herself killed," but it seems appropriate here.)

The theorem is that there is no nontrivial solution for aⁿ+bⁿ=cⁿ for n > 2 (setting a, b, c=0, or a=1, b=0, c=1 is considered trivial). Other mathematicians then spent a long time trying to prove it, and finding holes in each other's proofs. The now-accepted proof is very long and involves areas of math that had not been discovered (or invented, if you like) in Fermat's day, and it's generally considered that his proof was one of the flawed ones. But it's still "Fermat's last theorem," not "Weil's theorem."

So, yes, marginalia are usually trivial, or secondary to something else (someone else's comments on a writer's work, not organized into an essay), but not always.

[conuly]

I didn't know there was a name for that!

But to clarify my thought, as I see it it's the remains of another person's thoughts that are there. (This actually is how I see it, I'm not justifying it after the fact.)

[steorra]

Hm, ok, that's a closer analogy than I realized, although my mind still wants to throw up objections to it. I'll refrain, though :-)

[conuly]

It's not likely to come up often enough to annoy you, anyway :)