Dictionaries
What is a dictionary? A block of paper bound by two covers. A book, in other words. But a dictionary is not your average tome. It has thinner pages. Thin, yet tough. Hold one to the light and you see words imposed on words, a nonsense language. Open a dictionary and, to riff on Disney’s Pocahontas, you see words you never knew you never knew. “Hirsute,” for instance. I did not know that word meant “hairy, shaggy.” Nor did I know that “je ne sais quoi” meant “something elusive, or hard to describe or express.” I always thought it meant there was something sexy about someone — “He has a particular je ne sais quoi” — and felt ashamed for what I did not know, erstwhile teacher that I am. That is one aspect of dictionaries: they inspire shame about what you do not yet know, but should. You discover that all this time you have mistaken “garner” for “garnish” and feel as if you were wearing a Yankees hat in Boston Common.
The dictionary is a peripatetic thing. It is for those who wander, where routes matter, not arrivals. I can spend hours poring through the skinny pages, finding esoteric words that I drop into casual conversation. This effort can be as gauche as bringing the family silver to McDonalds. “What have you been up to?” my aunt asks us at dinner. “Nintendo,” Emma says. “Finals,” Leah says, peas falling from her mouth. They look at me. I read the room. “Oh, just talking to friends,” I say, “And I finished a roman fleuve, which I enjoyed.” “What’s a roman floovay?” Emma asks. Leah looks equally beguiled. “Is that a quiche?” she asks. My aunt sets her glass down and smiles. “I think Ben’s trying to say ‘roman floov,’ which is just a big novel that spans generations. Like Buddenbrooks. Right, Ben? That’s what you meant?” I nod with eyes shut tight.
“Lupercalia” was a Roman fertility festival. And “lucubrate” means to work by candlelight (“I lucubrated so long last night.”) A “radix” is a root. And a “sutee” is a Hindu widow who hops onto her husband’s funeral pyre. A “rumaki” is an appetizer consisting of chicken liver. And I never knew that “rumpus” meant “commotion,” nor that a “runcible spoon” was a “table utensil of indefinite form” in Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat.” (I got stuck on pgs. 1174–75). Then there’s all the scientific words I’ll never ever use: hexahydric, oophorectomy, corpusluteum (“a mass of yellow tissue formed in the ovary by a ruptured graafian follicle that has discharged its ovum.”). How are your graafian follicles doing? No! I was asking about your graafian follicles, not primordial follicles.
The more we can name, the more we can see. Inuit peoples have more than 100 words for snow. When ice falls from the sky, they see more than us, for whom snow is always snow. If you cannot name the objects, ideas, qualities, animals, and plants that surround you, that define you in some way, then you cannot know yourself. And if you cannot know yourself, and this mysterious world in which you’ve emerged, then you will always be dominated and controlled, your capacities never fully realized. Forget about democracy. And forget about knowing that person who sleeps next to you, the one you say you love, but whose qualities you cannot even name. You do not see yourself, so how can you see them? How can you love them? How can you grapple with the questions that stir your soul when you do not possess the language to ask them? What is a soul?
Dare to know! But how much? The dictionary is bound up with the Enlightenment, that moment when we discovered that it was this world we wanted to discover. Denis Diderot’s Encylopedie wanted to capture within a set of volumes all of the plants, people, animals, things, and ideas that occupy this grand universe. Knowledge of this world became power, after intellectual life had spilled out of the monastery and into the streets. Diderot’s Encyclopedie wanted to capture it all. “Encyclopedia” derives from the Greek kyklos, meaning “circle” and paideia, meaning “education.” Encyclopedia shares its root with Cyclops, that Greek giant who possessed a ginormous eye smack in the middle of his forehead. If encyclopedias are panoptic, then dictionaries are, too; they make all things visible for public consumption.
But who needs dictionaries? I have Google, and if I want a more authoritative source, there’s always Merriam-Webster Online. But the medium matters. Online, I enter a term in the search bar. If I don’t find what I want, I search again. I never feel like I’ve found exactly what I want, just an algorithmic approximation. And the online dictionary is no better. It’s a claustrophobic space. You can only see one word at a time, as if you’re walking through a prison, cell by cell. Let’s knock down the whole fucking thing and release the words from their bondage. Dictionary lovers are abolitionists.
Dictionaries are just like libraries, built for cruisers of the intellect. You don’t have to know what you want before you’ve found it. You can wander. Google doesn’t understand this. Its two o’s” are all-seeing eyes. They watch, measure, predict. Google, don’t show me what you think I want! Let me stumble upon it and judge for myself. I’m not just data for your algorithm. I’m human, a political animal. And I speak for myself. I choose where to go. I open my senses to the unexpected, the shocking, the beautiful. I feel free. Why is that such a controversial thing to say?
Open a dictionary, and you’ve entered the Meat Rack at Fire Island. You saunter the dark paths in Prospect Park. Cherry Grove. The Chelsea Piers (before gentrification). Words call to you like men. Greet them, know them, use them, and dispense with them. Saunter down the page, forward, backward, up and down, with no logic but the logic of your heart, that thing which makes critical thought possible. Open a dictionary, and release yourself from the algorithms that imprison us all.
