adDICTIONARY: of experimental language

In 2013, the poet, artist, and animal-rights activist Leanne Bridgewater (1989-2019) undertook the mammoth task of compiling a personal dictionary (of 12,000 words) to find a new way of sharing her unique and critically engaged view of the world, culture and history. The adDictionary, as it became known, sums up the essence of Leanne's enquiry in its very title: conveying the extent to which the dictionary was not simply about creating new definitions for existing words but also to create new words, often by colliding familiar ones together to form surprising and inventive coinages, for instance, abacsoma - a counted body; paralist - to make a mental list; ubi tubi - to be lost on the underground. Fascinated by dictionaries from a very early age, Leanne was driven by a utopian impulse - held in common with other historically unacknowledged legislators of the word - that is, if things could somehow be named in the right way, injustice, inequality and oppression could be made to vanish overnight as they become suddenly and irrevocably unthinkable because unsayable. As Leanne writes in her Introduction to the adDictionary (subtitled 'of experimental language'): "In today's world, we have achieved interaction with words so much that we believe we are superior to animals who do not speak. Language was around before the word; in the spirit of sounds, visuals, gestures and movement. With this dictionary I aim to encourage people to create new paths, new insights, to discover unknown places inside of themselves."