It had all started when The Authorities had been elected.
What a joke, she had thought. Everybody was laughing about it and calling it a protest vote. No worries, no chance they would last. I mean, come on! A party who promises to replace the Moon with a hydrogen balloon!
But to everybody’s surprise, The Authorities had done what they’d said. They had sent diggers to the Moon, and the diggers had dug. Silicon. Iron. Aluminum. Spinel, which they cast into gemstones when they returned to Earth. They had dug and the Moon had dwindled, day after day. This had got people’s attention.
Once the Moon had been gone, they had commissioned a team of scientists to propose a replacement. They called it an act of ‘conservation’ or an act of ‘conservatism’, depending on the day. It would all look as it had done before the digging, they said. They were pushing for the balloon solution, despite the scientists arguing that putting 21,971,669,064 km³ of hydrogen in the vicinity of a ball of fire was a recipe for disaster. The debate was getting a lot of attention.
In the meantime, they had started marketing themselves as ‘doers’. One does not make the Moon disappear for nothing after all. And everybody should be a doer, they said. They said one practices being a doer by speaking like a doer. In things and in events. In nouns and in verbs. And from this moment on, there should be no faffing about with adjectives and adverbs, which were the parts-of-speech of observers and tergiversators, people one had no use for. And the police would check on you. Oh yes.
This had created a hell of a lot of attention, in particular because people quibbled about the definition of the words ‘adjective’ and ‘adverb’, and were asking on Reddit whether they would get arrested for a ‘my’ or a ‘not’. The Authorities issued some clarifications. ‘Not’ was a no-no. A doer has no ‘not’ in their vocabulary. But they liked adjectives of possession. They paid a school teacher to say that ‘my’ was a determiner.
The linguist and her mates had scoffed at the adjective controversy, of course. As an act of resistance, they sprinkled their speech with nominalisations. The -ness type, most of the time, but on occasions the -hood type. They said there was some regrettableness in the disappearance of the Moon, and some veryhood of remarkableness in the idiocy of the hydrogen balloon. They met up in the underground, where they called themselves ‘The Loch-Ness Monsters’, or ‘Nessies’, or ‘Hoodies’, and frequented a café run by an accordionist in need. The place was what you might expect from a musician. A lot of spontaneity in the decoration and the cleanliness. A menu with a skill for metamorphosis. The toilet door had the typicalness of toilet doors and was covered with obscenities, ranging from “yes, give me not!” to “swallow my part-of-speech”. They would meet in the evening, drink, and -ness each other to death. Which was how the plan came about.
The linguist banged the dirt of the table, having downed several Żołądkowa Gorzka. She raised her hand, found her words, and blurted out: “We’re going to make a damnation of a virus and we’re going to stuff it down their throats!” And they did not understand at first but they all shouted ‘yeah!’ and ordered another drink.
The Nessies were doers. The implementation of the plan took place without flaw and without delay. A grammar was written and nicknamed “How to -ness and -hood everything”. The grammar was integrated into a parser. The parser was integrated into a virus. And the virus was launched on the Internet, starting from the servers of The Authorities’ television studios, a channel that produced government propaganda as well as the reality show “Portia and Suitors”.
Devastation ensued. The virus arrived on millions of computers that night, popping up in place of ads and transforming emojis into speech bubbles, all with one message.
“This device has received an enhancement in the form of a -ness and -hood generator. Use it without restraint. And remember: language goes beyond words. Language is, before anything, the ability to make meaning. Move beyond patterns, beyond what has been said in the past. Create and recreate language. Make it say what you want to see in the world. Their words have died, yours are to be born.”
People had got it. They had taken hints from the virus, and within weeks, they were -nessing and -hooding all on their own, developing the dialect of the resistance. That night, the linguist had been at the café teaching a workshop on obfuscation to a largeness of a crowd. Things were tipping over.
As she replayed all this in her mind, a train came at some highness of speed on the line above the underpass. She felt it in her spine, like a wake-up, the newness of an era, the rebirth of a moon.
‘A bloodiness of a masterpiece!’ she exclaimed at the wall, as the rumbling increased.
The graffiti shouted back in scarlet and Monospace font.
‘NOWHOOD IS YOUR TIME.’
By Aurelie Herbelot
This story was written at the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Spring 2020. A friend had proposed to a few of us that we should rewrite the Decameron. Over weeks of lockdown, we were given assignments by the Decameron Master. The assignment for this particular piece was ‘Write a story without adjectives or adverbs’.