These are a few of my favorite words, Part XIV

2008-12-28T13:15:10+00:00

Invented word edition! Because I come from a cluttery and packratty folk, I find a lot of use for clutter words, such as the slightly fear-inducing ‘kipple’ invented by P.K. Dick. But here’s another neologism of decades’ standing, which has much currency in my family:

mathom

…anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom. Their dwellings were apt to become rather crowded with mathoms, and many of the presents that passed from hand to hand were of that sort.
Prologue, The Ring Sets Out, The Lord of the Rings

J.R.R. Tolkien and P.K. Dick have my number entirely. Mathoms and kipple, alive, alive-o.

Kipple

2003-08-07T22:46:06+00:00

Sometimes I feel like my life is filling up with what P.K. Dick called kipple — clutter, useless junk, but not just the items themselves, the windrows they form, but the force of entropy multiplying them, forcing them on you, choking you in a sea of useless, discarded, and ultimately inescapable rubbish.

I don’t think it helps that my boss is a pack-rat. I go to work, and I’m surrounded by articles he’s clipped, correspondence he’s kept, and little trinkets he thought were interesting dating back to my elementary school years. Currently, at work, we’re trying to organize this stuff. I find it very frustrating. Not only that I have to do this for someone else (I was told by my {"Clean your room!“} parents all my {”Clean your room!“} life eventually emerging from the kipple was my {”Clean your room!"} OWN moral obligation and duty.) but that I come home from having done this for 4 hours or more a day, and I walk into the same mass of kipple, multiplying, spreading, striving against the checking influence of my husband, teeming, defiant; that I left in order to go to work in the morning. I figured out a long time ago that work is selling your life for money. Now it appears that it’s selling the little organizational impulse I have for money, too, and soon I will drown in a pile of sketches I must keep, books I’ll read later, coupons I’ve clipped, awards I’ve won, gifts I’ve received, and toys I’ve loved.

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These are a few of my favorite words, Part XIV

Kipple