DOCTOR: There are other sentient words out there, not all of them as belligerent as Ish. I’ve met a few myself. The Adjective of Noun! The Insouciant Maladictaballoons! And then there was the mysterious simile known only… as.

DOCTOR: Peri.

BOOK: Pathetic?

DOCTOR: You're sane. Enough of that I think... No no. Doctor.

BOOK: Verbose.

DOCTOR: You spent too much time talking with Peri.

Doctor: Of course you will be all right. Read! Write! Talk amongst yourselves. Oh, you have the whole cosmos of language to discover. All over again.

Peri: From start to–

Doctor: Fin... ish.

Peri: Periderm!

Warren: Uh, um… perihelion!

Peri: Pericarp!

Warren: Peri… cope. No, no, no, I’ve done that one…um, ah, peri… petia!

Peri: Perianth, pericycle, pericithium!

Warren: Oh, that’s so unfair! You win. How can I compete with all those botanical terms?

DOCTOR: I suspected that you would return here. Like tracing the etymology of a word, you came back. Back to where it really all started. The scene of the sign.

BOOK: She held no truck with the principle that we should define an entry using other words simpler than itself. ‘A concession to generality makes too great a sacrifice of eloquence. When we find a word that goes beyond our description, Book, we will have discovered the soul of the language, worth preserving simply because it exists.

(Beat.)

BOOK: I miss her. Very much.

PERI: Lexical transcendentalism?

DOCTOR: The study of and necessarily the search for the mythical longest word in the cosmos.

PERI: So what?

DOCTOR: So indeed, Peri. So is a very short word, but the dictionary provides for it dozens of distinct meanings, where as a much longer word like honorificabilitudinitatibus…

PERI: Not so many.

DOCTOR: Well, I can only think of three, offhand. The argument goes that the longer a word, the less often that word is used and therefore the more precisely focused its range of meanings. Are you with me?

PERI: So-so.

DOCTOR: Well, extend the length of the word to infinity, as the transcendentalists theorize, and, well, no one knows what it means.

PERI: Say it ain’t so!

DOCTOR: Peri, this is serious.

PERI: So sorry.

DOCTOR: Don’t be such a so-and-so.

DOCTOR: …he looked at me and said…‘Sausage?’, ‘Sausage?!’ and then he turned on his heel and stormed out!