Friday, May 20, 2005

 

I've Been Pejked

I wish to propose a new word.

Main Entry: pejk
Pronuncation: 'pīk
Function: verb
transitive sense
1 : to send someone searching for a thing that does not exist
see SNIPE HUNT
Etymology: Danish-American, from Next Big Thing producer Pejk Malinovski's reference to "a passage in The Unbearable Lightness of Being where Kundera talks about crossword puzzles."

Catnip, really, to someone about to embark on a year-long investigation of the role crosswords play in our lives. Except, as far as I can tell, such a passage does not exist. After scanning every page of the book in question, and then doing it again, it occurred to me that perhaps Pejk was simply thinking of the wrong title. The thought of looking at every page written by Kundera seemed daunting, but doable.

Then I remembered the Search Inside This Book function at amazon.com. Entering "crossword" into the search field yielded this response: No reference to crossword in this book. Same for:
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Immortality
Ignorance
Identity
The Joke
Life Is Elsewhere
Laughable Loves
Slowness
Farewell Waltz
Testaments Betrayed
The Art of the Novel

Am I forgetting any?
If not Kundera, then who might it have been?

[Thanks to Erin for the suggestion.]