Vocabulary, by Jason Schneiderman I used to love words, but not looking them up. Now I love both, the knowing, and the looking up, the absurdity of discovering that “boreal” has been meaning “northern” all this time or that “estrus” is a much better word for the times when I would most likely have said, “in heat.” When I was translating, the dictionary was my enemy, the repository of knowledge that I seemed incapable of retaining. The foreign word for “inflatable” simply would not stay in my head, though the English word “deictic,” after just one encounter, has stuck with me for a year. I once lost “desiccated” for a decade, first encountered in an unkind portrayal of Ronald Reagan, and then finally returned to me in an article about cheese. I fell in love with my husband, not when he told me what the word “apercus” means, but when I looked it up, and he was right. There’s even a word for when you use a word not to mean its meaning, but as a word itself, and I’d tell you what it was if I could remember it. My friend reads the dictionary for its perspective on culture, laughs when I say that reference books are not really books, but proleptic databases. My third grade teacher used to joke that if we were bored we could copy pages out of the dictionary, but when I did, also as a joke, she was horrified rather than amused. Discovery is always tinged with sorrow, the knowledge that you have been living without something, so we try to make learning the province of the young, who have less time to regret having lived in ignorance. My students are lost in dictionaries, unable to figure out why “categorize” means “to put into categories” or why the fifth definition of “standard” is the one that will make the sentence in question make sense. I wonder how anyone can live without knowing the word “wonder.” A famous author once said in an interview, that he ended his novel with an obscure word he was sure his reader would not know because he liked the idea of the reader looking it up. He wanted the reader, upon closing his book, to open another, that second book being a dictionary, and however much I may have loved that author, after reading that story (and this may surprise you) I loved him less. Share this:EmailPrintFacebookTwitterPinterestTumblrRedditPocketLike this:Like Loading...