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Now, imagine that you are deaf. Okay, so you are deaf. You are watching a reading of “The Jabberwocky.” In sign language.

Here.

Thank you, Zor, for telling me about this.

Watching this is fascinating to me because I’d never conceived of the concept of gibberish being translated into gesture.

I find it empowering to write in gibberish sometimes. I’m not quite sure why. Perhaps it’s because gibberish connects us subconsciously to the roots of our language which we already understand, gabbé?

At last, I looked closely at the opaque cone sticking down inside the ink bottle, and realized there was a tiny pit at the very tip (“tip” is pit backwards!), almost like a hole. Then I discovered that you can squeeze the little bulb projecting on the cap, and ink jets out. It was a hole at the tip! So the stick was filled with ink all along. I felt daft. And even worse, for a half a second, the very slightest bit… proud.

Realizing that the bottle has a built in ink-dropper means I can reload my pen significantly faster, while spilling about 75% less ink on my hands and all over my desk.

When I tried to teach my grandmother how to write with the quill and ink, she said, “What do you mean?” and looked at me blankly. Then, she grabbed up the paper and quill, flipped the nib upside down from the way I’d been holding it, so in her hand the metal nib curved concave side down, and wrote beautiful cursive letters. I tried it her way, and it works better than what I was doing before.