lectsica - Named my app after a knife
"Something is being built. It has a name."
There is a saying in Albanian — gjuha është e mprehtë si thika — the tongue is sharp like a knife. The interesting thing about gjuha is that it means both the organ and the language itself. The tongue. Language. The same word for both.
I have been thinking about that a lot lately.
I read. Not in the way that gets you on a BookTok, not in the way where you finish a book every three days and move on like you are changing clothes. I mean the kind of reading where you sit with something. Where you let it affect you. Where you write notes in the margins — or in my case, in Obsidian, which is basically the same thing but on a laptop.
The problem I have is simple: I own 111 physical books and I never know what to read next.
Goodreads does not help. StoryGraph gets close but not quite. What I want is something that knows me — that knows I cannot read the same author twice in a row, that knows after something heavy and philosophical I need something lighter but not stupid, that knows my reading rhythm the way a close friend would.
So I decided to build it.
The name took longer than expected. I wanted something that came from my people — not Latin, not Greek, not something you could find on a list of "cool app names." Something Illyrian. Something Dardanian, if possible, though almost no written record of that language survived the wars and the centuries and the silence that followed.
What survives are names. Tribal names. King names. Place names. Fragments.
Sica is one of them — an old Illyrian word for knife, still living in modern Albanian as thika, the sounds shifted but the meaning unchanged. I already used it once, for the main character of something I am writing. It felt right then. It feels right now.
Lect comes from lectio — the act of reading, the practice of it, the discipline.
Put them together and you get Lectsica.
The sharpness of reading. Knowledge that cuts. The tongue like a knife.
It is not explained anywhere on the app. You either know or you ask.
I have not written a single line of code yet.
But I have the name, the idea, and the frustration that started it all — which is usually enough.
More soon.