Home/About
Two Latin words, joined. Neither of them is about speed.
Liminanotio
līmen, līminis n.
A threshold. A doorway. The lintel over it — the beam you pass beneath on the way in.
It survives in liminal, in preliminary, and in eliminate, which meant, before it meant anything colder, to put a thing out of doors. Sublime is the same threshold seen from below: as high as the lintel.
nōtiō, nōtiōnis f.
A coming-to-know. An examination. The conception you arrive at by looking into something.
From nōscere, to know. It gives us notion directly, and stands cousin to notice and to cognition. Note that it is a knowing that happens, not a fact that sits there already known.
Read one way, the threshold of knowing — the doorway you stand in before understanding. Read the other way round, the idea at the doorway: the thought already waiting there when you arrive.
Saying it
We say LIM-ih-nuh-NOH-tee-oh, which is how a Roman would have said that -ti-. The other reading is lim-ih-nuh-NOH-shee-oh, which is how the same ending travelled through church Latin into English and came out as the -tion in notion, attention and every word like them.
So the second version is not a mistake. It is the same word arriving by the later road, and if it is the one that comes out of your mouth, you are in the company of most of the English language. We just prefer the older road.
What we do
Liminanotio shows one word at a time, in one place, so your eyes stop travelling. Most of what reading costs is transport — the jump between words, the doubling back over a line already read. Hold the words still and that expense disappears.
The pace is not fixed. It bends to the length of a word, to how common that word is, and to how many times you personally have read it before, so you are not held on the as long as on aforethought. You can watch the difference between the three modes on one passage.
The library is public-domain classics, taken from Project Gutenberg, each one fingerprinted at ingestion so it can be checked afterwards against the source it came from. Every book carries the hours it will actually take you — counted from the full text rather than estimated from a page count, and recalculated against your own pace once you have measured it. Your place is kept in every book at once, and a book you own is downloaded to the device, so it opens whether or not you are online.
Reading is free and needs no account.