St. Remedius Medical College: "Parts, Figures, and Equations of Speech"
There are worse things than two spaces after a period.
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
Much noise is made on how magic and mathematics might be the same, or at least adjacent. Much less is made of how magic and language are even closer. We talk about “death sentences,” or “killer copy,” or “the destroyer of words,” and regularly joke about a statement so definitive that “you never hear the one that takes you out.” How many, though, consider this to be literal instead of figurative?
The understanding that words have power, influence, and occasional weight has been a subject of research at St. Remedius Medical College since at least 1863, when a French professor was literally crushed under an unannotated thesaurus. The weight of some words is such a constant that “hairbrush” is a superior absolute measurement to the kilogram, having been calculated to 23 decimal points. “Metamorphosis” is the square of the weight of an electron, and the first known use of “fatoomsh” caused an earthquake and subsequent avalanche in the Tyrolean Alps in 1907. However, none of these had the impact of specific forms of punctuation. While much was made of the long-S being phased out in English with the implementation of the Unlawful Societies Act 1799, this was merely cover for the systematic removal of the literdew, possibly the most dangerous punctuation character used in any language.
A stylistic second cousin to the semicolon, the literdew was a character in English and French that could connect any two parts of speech, and connect them permanently in objective reality. While commas and ampersands can connect parts of speech on the symbolic level, a literdew, properly applied by a suitably trained writer, could rewrite the relationships between items and actions, to the point where they were permanently melded in association and in concrete applications. Removal of a literdew from a concept or group was incredibly dangerous to all involved, but less dangerous than its addition, as witnessed by an accidental use in 1832 that nearly made “chicken tree” as acceptable as “apple tree.” One could argue that its use qualified as magic, considering the extensive physical and mental preparation needed to use it each time, but some experts say “it’s less a virus than a spirochete, but infection with either will still mess with your day.”
Although an attempt to connect the speed of light to the price of silver in pounds Sterling was the reason why St. Remedius operatives worked tirelessly for two decades to locate and extirpate every example of existing literdews used to that point, this knowledge leaked to an otherwise unknown engineer at Apple, who built four prototype Macintoshes in 1984 that contained a keyboard shortcut for adding a literdew in every text application able to be run on a Macintosh at that time. The engineer was removed from existence thanks to selecting shift-command-tab-4-Y instead of shift-command-tab-5-U, but one prototype and keyboard survived the subsequent vaporization of the engineer’s neighborhood. This keyboard and computer is currently kept under the highest level of security in the St. Remedius library system, requiring six department heads and the dean to give simultaneous approval to access its vault. The rumor that the literdew was added to the first burned CD-ROM for Windows 95, and thereby could be accessed to terrible effect in the future, still cannot be confirmed.
Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to pass on word far and wide: the more, the merrier.