Four words, and the person who could write them down

A jotter page across a dusty blue shirt, punched down one side, ruled and level. HE MEANS at the top, underlined. Four rows, each an invented word joined to its meaning by a long dash: BOCKA — BLANKET. GALLA — THE LOUD ONE OUTSIDE. DUD — DOWNSTAIRS. MIMPY — THE GREY TOY.

The four words on the left are drawn at twice the weight of anything else on the page.

Somebody had to already know this language in order to write it down.

Why does the heading say HE MEANS?

Because the page is addressed to somebody. It is a translation supplied to a third party, not a record kept for its own sake.

A person taking notes on a language they are learning writes the word. Writing he means puts a reader on the other side of the page — an adult, a visitor, whoever is standing there having failed to understand. That single phrase turns the compiler into a position rather than a talent: the one who gets called over when the rest of the room stalls.

It also tells you the compiler was already fluent. Nobody assembles a reference for other people while still working the language out themselves.

Why are the left-hand words so much heavier than their meanings?

Because on this page the invented words are the content and the meanings are the notes, which is the right way round for a language and the wrong way round for a reference book.

You use a dictionary for its right-hand column; the headword is an index you pass through on the way to the definition you wanted. Here the weight sits entirely on the left, so BOCKA and MIMPY read as the objects on the page and BLANKET and THE GREY TOY read as footnotes.

That is how the words worked for the two who used them. The invented word was not a stand-in for the English one. It was the name.

What kind of definition is "the loud one outside"?

A description doing the work of a name, which is what you get when the person compiling the page is also a child.

GALLA — THE LOUD ONE OUTSIDE could be a dog, a bin lorry or a neighbour, and the entry declines to narrow it because in that house it never needed narrowing. MIMPY — THE GREY TOY identifies by colour, because colour is the property that toy is known by there. Both definitions are precise inside one household and useless three streets away.

BOCKA — BLANKET and DUD — DOWNSTAIRS are exact by comparison, so the vagueness is not a habit. It is what happens when the thing being named has no other name available.

Does a language like this need more than four entries?

No. Four is what there was, and a glossary that stops where the language stops is a complete document.

The temptation is to fill the page — twelve rows, both columns down to the bottom margin, a proper lexicon. It reads worse. Four rows with clear ruled space under them say somebody sat down, listed what was genuinely opaque, stopped, and left the page open. A system with three messages in it is complete at three, and a vocabulary of four words is complete at four.

Is translating for a younger child a favour or a job?

Work, on the evidence of the page. Somebody compiled a reference document so that the rest of the house could stop asking.

A translator gets interrupted — mid-game, mid-meal, halfway up the stairs, because somebody cannot make out what has just been said. The page is what you produce when you would rather hand a document over once than be stopped again all afternoon, which is a recognisable motive and not a generous one. Services between two children get priced, and where the price gets written down it makes a document of its own.

Whose shirt is this, the translator's or the other one's?

Either, and they come out as two different garments.

Worn by whoever compiled it, the page is a record of a job — proof of a period when one person in the house was the route everything went through. Worn by the person whose words those were, it is the earliest thing about them anybody bothered to write down, in somebody else's handwriting.

Neither reading is the quiet one. A grown adult in a shirt that says MIMPY — THE GREY TOY may be wearing it flat and deadpan or may be wearing it because the words are still funny to exactly one other person. That is theirs to decide, and worth asking rather than deciding for them.

Do invented words like these belong to anybody?

To the household that made them, and there is nothing to clear.

The four on this page were invented for the design and point at no real child. Words a real child made up belong to that child, who will be old enough to have a view on seeing them printed, and the asking costs nothing — the same question raised by a private name with two speakers.

An invented language out of a novel, a film or a game is different: that is somebody's published work, studios and estates license it routinely, and where a real one is the point, the permission is part of the job. Style has no owner. A work does. The household version is usually the better shirt regardless, because a recognisable word is a garment several thousand people already have.

Does it print well?

Yes, with one thing to watch.

Two inks: a pale panel and one dark hand on top of it. The heavy left column is in no danger. The right-hand meanings are the floor of the design — smaller, thinner, first to close up against a knit — so they want setting coarser and larger than they would be on paper, and the thin ruled lines want the same. The punched holes are solid dots and safe.

The panel's torn edge is the print's edge, which matters: a clean rectangle round a page reads as a photograph glued to the chest, a ragged one reads as paper. Mid-blue, sand and clay grounds all let the panel sit as paper rather than as a hole in the shirt.

How do I get one made?

Describe the words at JustOG — the word, what it meant, and who kept having to explain it. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

Ask what MIMPY is and you get told once, in the tone of somebody who has answered it before.