Slowly at first, but then rapidly, we began to desire a shelter for the snippets of email conversation to endure within. This became the project. We found the shelter, for the most part, in words that were not really part of normal idiomatic expressions. This allowed us to have a broad canvas on which to place little verbal cues, as if we were making a conversational collage come into existence, a definition of the dictionary term which could reside in the personal insinuation. We were, at first, mindful of the un-idiomatic term’s strict meaning, and tracked that meaning in and through one another’s utterances. Eventually, the very act of uttering, we both knew, had its inevitability, its destiny, inside the canvas term. Subsequently, then, we invented other canvas terms or phrases. from the Preface