w-holes

Definition

w-holes — holes that are whole. The book’s replacement for the word “thing.” An object appears complete by scientific inference and incomplete by logical deduction: it has no first cause, no thing-in-itself, no “first anything” — the phrase is oxymoronic. Every w-hole presents as sealed and total while resting on nothing that could ground it. The term names the way meaning closes around its own vacancy: the absence treated as, and experienced as, a whole.

Etymology & register

A compression of whole and hole. The word whole already contains the word hole; the hyphenated rendering w-hole exposes the hole inside the whole rather than letting orthography conceal it. The hyphen is load-bearing and is never closed up — the visible seam is the argument, not a typo.

• Lowercase always. Hyphenated always — w-hole singular, w-holes plural. Never “whole,” “hole,” or any closed form.
• Italic in the glossary tier and at the coining moment only, per the book’s three-tier neologism convention (glossary italic / coining-moment italic / deployed-vocabulary roman). Every subsequent and echo use is roman.
• Treated as a common-noun replacement, not a proper noun — no capitalization at sentence-adjacent positions where avoidable.
• No substitute synonyms (“thing,” “object,” “entity”) when the w-hole sense is active. The term is canonical and load-bearing; flag ambiguity rather than silently swapping.

See also

• Alogical Isness — metaphysical claim w-holes correlate at object-level
• Contextus Claudit — closed context that makes a w-hole’s foundation unreachable from inside

Appears in

• Malgré Tout — Chapter III (“Alogical Isness”), at the coining; deployed as established vocabulary thereafter