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208 wordies list
palimpsest |
(n): a manuscript (usually written on papyrus or parchment) on which more than one text has been written with the earlier writing incompletely erased and still visible
(n): handwritten book or document
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Interesting usage on landaulet.
We were always told, in Landscape Archaeology, that a palimpsest was the whole landscape, in its infinite complexity, spread out before us.
I like a plimpsest much better.
"All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary." 1984 by George Orwell
This reminds me of powder pimpalimpimp... for some reason...
I think of the country as a kind of palimpsest scrawled over with the comings and goings of people, the erasure of time already in process even as the marks of passage are put down. Wendell Berry "A Native Hill"
Used in Italian (palinsesto) simply to mean the programming of TV shows.
My favorite word in the English language, thanks to Umberto Eco.
http://www.stasisfield.com/space/present/palimpsest/catalog/index.html
Discovered in The Widow of the South by Robert Hicks