Lost Language

From diary pages to digital screens, tracing the slow disappearance of texture, error, and voice.

- Words by AKSHAYA PILLAI

My high school diary is bursting with things that will never fall out. Newspaper clippings, chocolate wrappers, notes passed in class, everything kept at the same distance from forgetting. Somewhere in the middle, in the voluptuous self-conscious handwriting of a 14-year-old, in a sentence about love, is the word ‘surreptitiously’. It is missing an ‘r’ but absolutely certain of itself. More interesting than the spelling mistake is the fact that I remember, with complete clarity, where I first encountered the word. I collected it from Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss and its meaning from my midnight blue pocket dictionary. As I flipped through some of the other diary entries, I met more of these words that I had discovered in 2004. Malady. Maudlin. Nocturne. Mildew. Petrichor. Perspicacious.

Do you remember being smitten with a new word? Not knowing how to hold it and letting it sit in your mouth like a toffee taken from a jar out of reach. Feeling it soften as you pronounce it wrong. Even today I wish list words on the back of books and in the drawers of my notes app. Foetid being the latest. But would I even be allowed to spell it wrong? How funny is it that your devices will not let you make a mistake. The red squiggly line too is now mostly a thing of the past. Now the word autocorrects itself before the hop and skip of the space bar. Are we losing something in this race for accuracy? More interestingly, if words no longer misbehave in our hands or heads, do we even know them?