Appunti di parole

At a time when everything seems to be going digital, it occasionally happens that html pages do a U-turn and start heading for paper again. This is the case of Appunti di parole, a little book containing extracts from the light-hearted and carefree blog of illustrator Yoshiko Noda, otherwise known as Yocci.

An odd selection of words, or as Giuseppe Antonelli says in his introduction, “an anarchic abacus in which Yocci collects in strictly unalphabetical order ... over a hundred words belonging to a splendidly superfluous vocabulary”.

R for Rascal, U for Unthinkable, M for Mushroominess, J for Julep, L for Loony, W for Whistle: the words (written immediately underneath in katakana) in Italian and Japanese jostle and vie for space, chasing one another to the end of the book where they all group together in a four-language glossary.

A dictionary of ideolemmas (each word a drawing) where the author chooses analogy rather than philology to recreate that sense of wonder that occurs when you learn a new language – this time appearing very close to our own, only more poetic.