Where articles are one cent and up it goes from there.
Hyacinth Stellars lives in Universe Z. Not lacking in quirky exceptions, Hyacinth’s world is almost identical to ours. For Universe Z the majority of colloquial words in written form were patented in every language by giant international monoliths. Along with pen and paper, the writer must buy her words at the market.
Articles are the cheapest of course, but otherwise the prices follow the rules of demand and supply. Common words and multi-syllable words are the most expensive. Consequently, whatever is common is esoteric and the abstruse is made prosaic.
Syllables come in and out of vogue. For example, post war anti-finialists refused more than three syllable words. Anything worth expressing by writing, they argued, should infuse the reader with its intended message efficiently without flourish. Anti-capitalists boycotted all punctuation, especially apostrophes who epitomized the obliquity of intellectual property and were owned by Monsanto (now called Bayer). If a text had many long words hanging about it, they were probably counterfeit compounds like ‘cottonswab’ and ‘delimeat.’
Hyacinth Stellars, a burgeoning poet, bought a wheelbarrow’s worth of verbiage each week. Two-thirds articles and conjunctions, one-third nouns and adjectives, and then if she could afford it, three or four lovely words. Last Saturday she was beaming all day long from purchasing coruscate on sale. Onomatopoeias were once on a tremendous discount and words like tintinnabulation still dribble out of her desk drawers. Only one of the twenty odd onomatopoeias made it into her first book “Pronouncing.”
Some months ago, she was so broke she could only afford a child’s handful of articles, one preposition, and a heavily discounted noun and verb. The clerk wouldn’t sell her a period half-price but gave her three other punctuations for free. Hyacinth composed the following poem for her lover (title added later):
“28 Cent Love Poem”
Of
of the
The
spilled into
a
The A,
the a
to be an
For of,
Of the being for—
Of—
An!
“I like it better this way,” her girlfriend told her when she’d received it. “It’s like when you pick flowers from all over the neighborhood instead of buying a flower arrangement.”
Magazine and newspaper advertisements claiming to help you “write your own words!” sat in columns next to ads for cures of baldness, untenable erections, and psychics. Hyacinth finally gave into her curiosity one Sunday and walked to a wordsmith’s address from one of these ads. It was, predictably, a complete sham. Citing presidents, philosophers, and others, they taught that you could simply “manifest your own words.”
An hour and half-a-sham later she slinked away with a trio of complementary terms in her pocket. Moments later saw her emerging from the street into WORD, a crisp air-conditioned department store that smelled like a post office. Hyacinth Stellars handed the cashier Parlouse, maneyefold, and snickerly.
“Misprints,” she stated with a hint of curt expectation and looked away feigning the dispassion of a career journalist. Receipts were rare for a trivial purchase since the words equal the cost or more than the items bought.
Five folded bills came home with her that day. It was the most she’d ever made from words.