mistifiki

The last word of the band, and it means "to hoax". Rank 2,900 exactly, the final entry of chapter 30, and what the frequency list hands over is a verb for convincing somebody of something that is not true, for the pleasure of it. There was no arranging that.

The seam looks live, and it is not. Esperanto really does have a mis- prefix, meaning wrongly or amiss: miskompreni is to misunderstand, misuzi to misuse, mispaŝi to take a wrong step. So a reader hits mis-tifiki and starts looking for a root tifik-. There is none, in any dictionary, and there never was. Mistifik- is one borrowed root from French mystifier, and it is the mist- in it that is doing the meaning: the same Greek mustes that gives mistero at 659 and the word mistiko. This trap is sharper than most because the prefix it imitates is genuinely productive - the false seam works precisely because the real machine exists.

Not trompi. Trompi at 777 is to deceive, and its point is usually gain: you cheat somebody out of money, or a promise, or an advantage. Mistifiki is deception as construction. It wants an audience, a plausible surface and a moment when the thing comes apart - the forged letter, the faked photograph, the invented country in a learned journal, the village convinced for one evening that something has landed in the field. Sometimes it is cruel and sometimes it is the best joke anyone has made all year, and the verb does not decide which. Mistifiko is the hoax itself and mistifikanto the person running it.

And the sharpest version needs nobody to be running it. In this chapter's story, la plenluno, two boys walk out under the moon and talk themselves into a goblin, then into something worse; the white figure at the end of the garden turns out to be an old woman in a coat and a wig, gathering herbs, who has hoaxed precisely no one. Mistifiki needs a victim, and it turns out you can supply your own.