Cordecho noun
- A profound, transcendent feeling of connection that a reader experiences when an idea, event, or moment in a text resonates so deeply that it assures them they are not alone.
"The novel's description of longing struck her with cordecho—a fleeting yet luminous certainty that her quietest fears had been whispered by souls long gone."
"The author's honesty created a cordecho in readers worldwide."
Dear Writer,
Cordecho is a word not found in any AI training set (as of writing this), let alone the Oxford Dictionary. I invented it.
Why did I invent it? Allow me a quote from John Steinbeck, who drew inspiration from Faulkner, who in turn looked to Shakespeare—himself a borrower of ideas. In literature, ideas travel through time in curious ways, and the age of AI has not changed that.
"The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species.
Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion. My great predecessor, William Faulkner referred to it as a tragedy of universal fear so long sustained that there were no longer problems of the spirit, so that only the human heart in conflict with itself seemed worth writing about.
Faulkner, more than most men, was aware of human strength as well as of human weakness. He knew that the understanding and the resolution of fear are a large part of the writer's reason for being."
I want cordecho in this world. I want to connect with you in words that mean something on a fundamental level of being.
So, write with any tools that get you there. If it's cordecho, wonderful. If it's pen and paper, wonderful. I want to connect, and I want to connect through the words you write.
Yours in story,
C.S. Shirriff, 2025