The Archive

Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi is a young Nigerian poet and essayist, currently completing the clinical year of his studies in veterinary medicine. His poems have appeared all over the place; we are partial to this one. As for his essays, you might do well to start here. For his first submission to us —and we are already pressing him for more—, Abdullah sent in a hybrid fiction/nonfiction piece of writing that, as you will soon see, speaks to some of the very deepest concerns that animate us here at The Hinternet. Our editorial offices in Quimper receive a steady stream of submissions from authors who are plainly trying a little too hard to sound like us — Abdullah isn’t trying. It is, rather, simply that he loves language like we do, and because of this he cannot fail to see what is currently happening to it. But we’re hoping, and we mean this sincerely, that he might help us now to save it. —The Editors

I keep the archive at a constant fifty degrees. Any warmer and the paper begins to sigh, curling at the edges like leaves in late August. The room smells faintly of loam and ozone, as if a storm has just passed through — though the storm is only the quiet whirr of servers tucked behind false walls. I call them “false” not because they aren’t real, but because they pretend to be part of the building when, in fact, the building is part of them.

Each drawer is labelled by the manner of disappearance. Some words were legislated away: officially retired by committees, struck from dictionaries, stripped from syllabi. Others fell through algorithmic cracks — words flagged as “inappropriate” by automated filters, then ghosted from feeds, search engines, and transcripts. Still others died a quieter death: no one used them anymore, so the systems concluded they were irrelevant, and erased them for efficiency.

Yesterday I found solastalgia. A real term —Australian in origin— meaning the ache one feels when home changes beyond recognition, usually from environmental loss. In my youth, you could still search it and find essays, images of flooded plains, conversations between climate refugees. Now, the word returns nothing but an error page and a friendly suggestion: “Did you mean solace?”

No, I did not.

I slipped solastalgia into an acid-free envelope and filed it under “Algorithmic Casualties”, between beefbrain and paracosm. I logged its last known public appearance: a blog post from seven years ago, archived only in fragments, the photographs long replaced by blank gray squares. The author, anonymous, had written about watching their childhood valley transform into a mining pit. Without the word, their grief became harder to name. And without a name, grief becomes harder to notice at all.

This is the quiet violence no one teaches you about. Platforms talk of “safety” when they purge content, but safety for whom? In 2019, a large social network deployed an AI moderation system that automatically deleted phrases it deemed hateful. In practice, many of those phrases were part of Indigenous languages or coded expressions used by marginalized communities to speak about their lives. The moderators —human or machine— rarely knew the meanings. The words vanished without ceremony, like names scraped from a memorial.

I catalogue them all. It is a futile project, perhaps, because a word without speakers is a seed sealed in glass. But the glass is clear, and I want to believe that someone, someday, will want to plant them again.

When I was younger, I imagined archives as places of celebration, where old things were cherished and displayed. This one is different. It’s a hospice for language, and I am the sole attendant. Some nights, when the building is still, I think I hear the faintest murmurs, syllables brushing against each other in the dark, rehearsing the day they might be spoken aloud again.

I have no illusions about saving them all. The internet’s deletions are relentless, and there are new losses every hour. But I resist in the smallest way possible: by bearing witness, by keeping the record intact, by refusing to let a word’s final breath be the moment its server connection is severed.

When solastalgia arrived, I copied it by hand into my personal notebook — a habit I keep for words that cut too close to my own life. I thought of my grandmother’s farm, swallowed by a development whose streets bore names of trees that no longer grew there. I thought of the way my father avoided visiting, as if absence could insulate him from change.

I pressed the pen nearly hard enough to tear the page. I whispered the word aloud. The servers hummed, the drawers stood silent, and the air seemed to lean closer.

The first time I whispered solastalgia aloud in public, nothing happened. I was in line at the post office, murmuring it under my breath as if practicing the pronunciation of a foreign name. The woman ahead of me glanced over, then returned to tapping her phone. I felt foolish, as though I had expected magic to arrive on demand.

But the next morning, as I crossed the market square, I heard a man explaining to a stallholder why he’d stopped visiting the lakeshore. “Too many condos now,” he said. “Gives me… what’s that word?” He frowned, then his face brightened. “Solastalgia.”

I froze. It was the exact intonation I’d spoken the night before, as if the word had slipped from my mouth into the air and, overnight, found another tongue to rest in.

That was when I began to experiment.

I wrote words from the archive on small slips of paper and hid them in library books, folded into the creases of travel guides or tucked behind the title pages of old poetry collections. Some were regional idioms: la bouffée, a Québécois term for the rush of relief after stepping inside from winter wind; kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold, used figuratively to mean beauty in fracture. Others were the unadopted orphans of academic jargon, abandoned after their funding cycles ended.

A month later, I overheard la bouffée in the coatroom of a community center. A teenager told his friend, “Man, when that heater kicked in, I got la bouffée.” He laughed. His friend laughed too, as though they’d both known the word all their lives.

By then, I was convinced the archive was speaking back. At night, in the low hum of the server room, I caught murmurs just at the edge of hearing — syllables brushing like moth wings against the glass. Words wanted to be spoken. They pressed at the edges of silence, testing for cracks.

This was not magic in the fairy-tale sense. It was something subtler: the quiet mechanics of memory and suggestion. Psycholinguists call it “priming” — a word heard in passing can lodge invisibly in the mind, waiting for the right moment to surface. And then there’s the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis: the idea that the structure of language shapes how we perceive reality. A lost word is a lost lens; restore the lens, and you change what can be seen.

The implications were political as much as poetic. If an algorithm could erase words —and with them, certain ways of knowing— then to reincant them was an act of resistance. Every utterance became a small defiance, a refusal to allow thought to be narrowed by what was searchable.

I began traveling to small towns with a satchel of paper slips. At diners, I would leave a word on the counter with my tip; in laundromats, I would slide one into the slot of a payphone. The responses were never immediate. But weeks later, a phrase from the archive would reappear in the most ordinary conversations, as if it had been there all along.

The most startling return was paracosm — the private imaginary world of a child, complete with its own geography, history, and politics. I’d left it scrawled on a bus ticket, discarded in the gutter outside a high school. Months later, in a hardware store, I overheard a father telling the clerk, “My daughter’s built this whole… paracosm, she calls it. Like a city in her head. Says she’s the mayor.”

It was working. Or perhaps the archive had always been working, and I was just its courier.

I keep my role small. I’m not here to resurrect every word, only to give some of them a chance to find their way home. The act is not about permanence —the internet will go on deleting, algorithms will go on forgetting— but about persistence. A word spoken is never truly alone. It enters someone’s breath, their memory, their story.

Even now, when I hear solastalgia spoken by strangers, I feel that same quiet ache I did in the post office. Not sadness, exactly, but recognition — the knowledge that the archive is not just a room or a database. It’s a living network of tongues and ears, carrying what’s been erased back into the world.

I will keep whispering.