The stuff itself — documents, fragments, lyrics, recordings. What the house holds, as distinct from how.
A curved path from one point to another, and the shape a story travels. Both rise and return.
Made things left behind, and unintended marks left by a process. The same word for what was meant and what crept in.
Things sent alongside a message, belonging to it without being it. Carried by the message rather than contained in its words.
To write with a leading capital, marking a name or a start. Also to turn something held into working value.
Text set beside an image to say what it is. A caption decides how the picture is read.
A single leaf holding one thing at a time. From the papyrus sheet, and beneath that from the verb to scratch - a card is a surface marked so it can be read.
Work made to produce laughter, and the shape of a story that ends well. Both are about relief arriving.
What a thing holds inside it. From the same root as contentment - to be content is to have one's wants bounded by what is already held.
A showing meant to prove rather than describe. A demo ends an argument by being watched.
Documentation written inside the code it describes, so the two cannot drift apart. Explanation kept where it belongs.
A written thing kept as evidence or reference. A document holds its claim still so it can be checked later.
Written explanation kept beside a thing so others can use it. Documentation is a claim, and it drifts from the truth unless tended.
The mark showing something has been left out. An ellipsis is honest about omission where silence is not.
To set a thing inside another so it belongs there. What is embedded travels with its host.
What encloses a message for carrying. Also the shape of a sound's rise and fall over time.
Answers kept ready for the questions that keep being asked. An FAQ is evidence of where a thing is unclear.
A stream of items arriving in order. Also to supply — the same word for what is given and for the giving.
A piece broken from a whole that no longer stands. A fragment carries evidence of the break as well as of the thing.
A place where made things are shown together. The arrangement is part of the showing.
The named divisions that show a document's structure. Headings are a map laid inside the territory.
The figure a story is carried by. Also the first, largest surface a visitor meets.
The language that gives a document its structure and meaning for the web. A named language rather than a concept.
A single written sign, and a written message sent to one person. Both are marks made to be read by another.
Words written to be sung. Lyric is the oldest place where a body's feeling was allowed a form.
A work as written before it is published. Literally hand-written — the form a thing takes while still the author's.
A plain way of marking text so its structure is readable by both people and machines. A named format rather than a concept.
Martyria (Greek μαρτυρία: testimony, the statement of a witness). What a maker's own tool did to a picture, written into the picture, in bytes nothing quietly rounded on the way out. A testimony is bounded by what the witness actually knows, and the whole discipline of this word is the boundary: an application knows exactly one thing, which is what IT did, and the sentence everyone reaches for first — "this image is not AI-generated" — is a claim about someone else's file the moment the picture came in from somewhere else. One overclaim costs the entire declaration its worth to the one person who ever checks it, so every sentence is scoped to this application's own edits, the disclaimer saying so has no off switch and no key that could drop it, and the one origin that may honestly be named — IPTC digitalCapture, for a frame this app's own camera made — is set from a single exact value and from nothing else. algorithmicMedia is deliberately never used, because it covers any algorithm at all and would mislead every reader who has learned it means a model; trainedAlgorithmicMedia, the AI term, appears only inside the negation. The claim is columns rather than prose — five key/value pairs a reader showing only one field still learns something true from — and it is carried as PNG iTXt and never tEXt, because tEXt is Latin-1 and would mangle a name with a fada in it. Beneath the sentence lies the reason the bytes can be testified to at all: a two-dimensional canvas backing store holds premultiplied colour, so straight-alpha pixels pushed through it come back quantised — at alpha eight of 255, nine of 256 values a channel survive — and so the file is built by hand, colour type 6, eight bits, all five row filters chosen by cost, with a stored-block fallback so the result is always a valid file. Bytes that are not a picture come back unchanged rather than thrown, because metadata is never worth losing a file over. It answers the flagging problem by giving a checker something honest to read; it is evidence and never a lock, and a chunk anyone can strip is not a claim about tamper.
The carriers meaning travels in — image, sound, text, moving picture. The medium is never neutral about what it carries.
A point in lived time small enough to hold — the unit a reaction pins to, the place a memory anchors.
Running across more than one line. Of a thing too long to be held in a single row.
Events told in an order that makes them mean something. Narrative is not what happened; it is the shape given to what happened.
The mark for a paragraph. A fragment as it appears in this library, not an English word.
One surface of a larger work. A unit of reading, bounded by how much a reader can hold at once.
Pandulipi (Sanskrit पाण्डुलिपि: a manuscript — literally a pale-ochre writing, the sheet before it is a book). The typescript as an editor expects to receive it, and nothing beyond that: twelve-point monospace with Courier named first and the family names left as data a consumer may override, double-spaced, one-inch margins on a US Letter page and A4 by one option that switches the @page size VALUE and not one other character of the sheet; a title page carrying the author's contact block top-left verbatim and the word count top-right rounded to the nearest hundred, with the exact count riding beside it so the convention loses nothing; the title a third of the way down and the by-line beneath it; every chapter beginning a third of the way down a fresh page; a scene break set as one centred hash, whether it was written as a hash, three stars or three spaced stars; paragraphs indented half an inch with no blank line between them; italics kept as italics, underline one option away and one CSS rule wide. THE TEXT IS NEVER ALTERED, and that is the whole carefulness of it: every literal run of the source is recorded with its byte offsets and is a byte-exact slice, every character no run covers is one of a declared markup alphabet so a dropped word would stand in a gap as its own letters, and markdown the dialect does not set rides as its own characters, never mended — no smart quotes, no folded ellipsis, no dash substitution, no collapsed whitespace, no corrected typo. THE PAGE COUNT IS THE PRINT ENGINE'S: the running head is one @page margin box with a CSS counter in it, upper-cased by CSS so no case change touches the text, and the result declares `pages` and never sets it. No glyph typesetting, no hyphenation, no kerning, and no widow or orphan rule claimed or written. No clock, no disk, no network, no host global, zero imports: a manuscript in, one paged HTML out.
Panti (Sanskrit paṅkti पङ्क्ति: a row, a line of things set side by side; and the metre whose verses stand in fives). A table's own logic as data, holding no data: how a column's sort direction cycles, what a typed filter mode means, which rows are chosen, and what a row's stable identity is. THE CYCLE CLOSES — null to ascending to descending to null — so three clicks on a header return the order the rows arrived in, which a two-state toggle makes unreachable. AN ABSENT VALUE IS NOT A SMALL VALUE: null and undefined sort LAST in both directions, the one asymmetry in the whole surface and the right one. Sorting is a COPY and never a mutation, and every selection act returns a new Set, so nothing a caller still holds is changed underneath it. Three filter modes and no fourth — contains, exact, startsWith, all case-folded — with a whitespace-only needle refused as no filter at all and a null cell matching nothing. A row's id is the row's OWN key where it has one, so it travels with the row through a re-order and a selected row stays selected; where the data offers no identity the fallback is positional and the water says so rather than offering an illusion. No DOM, no framework, no clock, no network, zero imports, and nothing throws.
A written work set down to be read and answered — a draft, a telling, a record put in a form that can travel. What is written stays readable after the writing.
Patakatha (Sanskrit पटकथा: a screenplay — literally the screen's story, paṭa the screen and kathā the tale). The script as the trade sets it, and nothing beyond that: a FIXED-PITCH page, which is the whole of it — twelve-point Courier at ten characters and six lines to the inch, on US Letter with margins of one inch and one and a half at the inner edge, giving SIXTY COLUMNS BY FIFTY-FOUR LINES exactly, with one page running one minute. Six elements and no more, each told apart by a stated test rather than a guess: a slugline is a shouted line opening INT., EXT., EST. or I/E.; a transition is a shouted line ending TO:, IN: or OUT:, or FADE OUT. read whole; a character cue is a shouted line no longer than the name column, not ending in a colon, and answered by a non-blank line; what follows a cue is dialogue until a blank line ends the speech, and a bracketed line inside it is a parenthetical; everything else is action. Their columns are arithmetic on the measure: action and slugline at column 0 across 60, dialogue at 10 across 35, a parenthetical at 16 across 20, a cue at 22 across 33, and a transition flush right at column 60. Two blank lines before a scene heading, one before action, a cue and a transition, none before a parenthetical or a line of speech; a blank line never opens a page; a slugline never stands as a page's last line and a cue never as its last two. THE TEXT IS NEVER ALTERED, and that is the whole carefulness of it: UPPER CASE IS HOW THE GRAMMAR READS A LINE AND NEVER HOW IT SETS ONE, so a lower-case scene heading stays lower-case and is simply not a scene heading; wrapping breaks only at spaces, so a word longer than its column stands alone and overruns the column rather than being cut; every element carries its byte offsets in the source it was read from and is a byte-exact slice of it; and every character no element covers is one of a declared separator alphabet, so a dropped line would stand in a gap as its own letters. THE PAGE COUNT IS THE FORMAT'S OWN AND IS COUNTED HERE — a fixed-pitch page is arithmetic, not typesetting — which is exactly where this water parts from the-pandulipi, whose paged HTML only a print engine can measure. No (MORE) and no (CONT'D) is written; no scene numbers, no revision marks, no dual dialogue, no title-page key block, and no A4 measure invented. No clock, no disk, no network, no host global, zero imports: a work in, a laid script out, and nothing throws.
A format that fixes a document's appearance wherever it is opened. A named format rather than a concept.
The showing again of what was recorded. Playback returns the record, never the moment.
Something published for others to meet. Also an upright that bears weight, and to send onward.
What is said before the substance, to set what follows in place. A preamble is orientation, not content.
To set marks on a surface so they can be read. Also to emit a line of output — the same act, one in ink and one in light.
Procession (Latin procedere, to go forward): rooms walked one after another at the walker's own pace. Not a grid, which says "choose quickly"; not a carousel, which says "keep moving"; a procession says "dwell here." As a shape: sections become decks, and within a deck the room in view comes to rest at the centre of the view and the rooms already walked lift upward above it — smaller, dimmer, still there, at most a few deep — until the deck is complete and the corridor holds a breath, the dwell, before the next section. The order is the declaration's and never a rank; the corridor cannot see the reader; every room is a landmark; a room without a window keeps its sigil; and under reduced motion the settle is identity. The dress owns every pixel. The shape and the numbers are the water's.
The reader's own walk along a coast of released work — full-screen, one release at a time, every advance the reader's explicit act. The transplant made sovereign: effortless sampling of a chosen coast, with attention returned rather than captured.
The making public of what was private. Publication is a threshold — after it, the work belongs to its readers too.
Another's words repeated exactly, marked as theirs. A quote that is tidied is a small lie about who spoke.
The door plate of a body of work — what to know before entering. A readme is a promise about what is inside.
Sound or motion captured so it can be met again. A recording returns the record, never the moment.
A story, a tale, a piece of news — the thing one person carries to another. Irish; what the seanchaí keeps and gives aloud. Older than any medium that holds it. This house's video studio.
A bounded stretch of happening, held as one view. Everything within it shares a place and a moment.
To move a view across matter longer than the frame. Also the rolled document that gave the motion its name.
A setting made to present work well. A showcase chooses, and choosing is part of the claim.
Small extracted pieces kept for reuse. A snippet is a fragment saved because it will be wanted again.
Small notes placed where they will be seen. They hold a thought outside a head so it need not be carried.
Events told so that they mean something to whoever hears them. A story is a shape laid over what happened.
A second line under a title, and text shown for speech. Both carry what the main line alone would not deliver.
Suchi (Sanskrit sūcī सूची: a needle, and by extension the index — the list that points). A repo that reads itself: its own tree drawn from its own file paths, its own markdown grouped by its own folders, and EACH PAPER'S TITLE TAKEN FROM THE PAPER'S OWN FIRST HEADING — never a string typed beside it, never a lookup table, so a document renamed in its own first line is renamed everywhere at once. A folder becomes a group whose label is derived from the folder name; the repo root sorts first whatever it would do alphabetically. The house's one-line italic gloss under a heading becomes the blurb where it is there and null where it is not — a badge line is not a gloss and neither is a bold one — and a file with no heading at all falls back to its own filename rather than being invented a title or dropped from the index. A paper that declares itself a MIRROR-class self-map is known by the phrase in its own text and never by its filename, so a future self-map inherits the rule by saying so. THE WATER OWNS NEITHER THE BUILD TOOL NOR THE GLOB: it declares the glob's RESULT — path to raw text — as a host surface of one verb and supplies none of it, so the same repo handed over by a build-tool host or a filesystem host or an in-memory fixture yields byte-identical answers. A sūcī points at what is there; it is not the thing, and it holds no copy of the thing.
One line saying what a thing is for. A tagline is the shortest honest form of a promise.
Words joined into a fabric. Literally a thing woven - a text is threads crossed until they hold together.
A place made for showing a made thing to those gathered to watch. The watching is part of the work.
A place made for showing a made thing to those gathered to see it. The watching is part of the work.
Belonging to performance before an audience. Of what is shaped by being watched.
The name given to a work, and the right of holding a thing. Both are claims made in public.
A path left by passage, and the following of it. Also one recorded piece among several.
Speech written down as it was said. A transcript's worth is that it does not tidy.
The extension marking a plain text file. A named abbreviation rather than a concept.
Moving pictures held so they can be shown again. Time recorded rather than a moment.
Set down in language that outlasts the saying. What is written can be checked; what was said cannot.