The World of Words

When my university library arranged online access to the complete Oxford English Dictionary recently, I found another convenient outlet for my almost lifelong fascination with the world of words—their definitions, connotations, pronunciations, and origins. From my first words learned as a child to the most recent examples of technological jargon created to characterize aspects of the evolving environment in which we live, I always have been intrigued by these signifiers made up merely of markings on a page or pixel dots on a digital screen.

Even for entertainment, I have enjoyed word games. When I was a graduate college student and worked at the New York Public Library’s research center on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, on fair afternoons I’d spend every lunch hour on the front steps between the famous library lions, and I’d challenge myself to finish the daily crossword in the New York Times while I ate a hero sandwich or a couple of knishes, testing myself by trying to finish the puzzle before consuming my final bite.

Repeatedly, during lunch breaks while working on the computer, I now find entertainment for myself by dipping into the online dictionary just to discover additional etymological tidbits about words or terms with which I thought I had a fair degree of familiarity. Nouns, verbs, and adjectives I have appreciated and thought I had known so well—through everyday use in prose composition, during crossword play, or within lines of poetry—suddenly seem even richer upon my opening of their page in the online OED. I relish each detail of a word’s historical development (as well as the multiple quotes gathered over time, chronicling gradations in their meanings and minute alterations in the shadings of their connotations or tone) due to a series of successive changes throughout the chronological stages in the English language.

Like many other writers and editors, I often have considered the various elements of vocabulary as the rudimentary tools with which interesting literature can be constructed. Each semester I try to emphasize to my creative writing students the way words seem to be nearly tangible to many authors. Words sometimes invoke supplementary sensory responses among writers. In addition to images, certain traces of sound, scent, texture, or taste arise with every complex combination of vowels and consonants that distinguishes one word from another.

When advising my writing students, I encourage an intimate knowledge of language that allows them to draw their readers fully and persuasively into the atmosphere of any scene they imagine in their works. Additionally, I urge an exploration of the unique layers of language associated with specific words, knowledge of the exact definitions and multiple secondary meanings each word carries with it when entering one’s written work.

Indeed, even words that at first appear to be synonyms frequently feel different to individual writers, particularly when placed side by side with other words. Though I hesitate to present a baseball analogy on this day when the investigative report on steroid use in the major leagues has been released, I must say that when I consider use of a certain word choice, I am sometimes reminded of my days playing baseball so long ago, and I recall how I’d lift each bat strewn around the on-deck circle as I awaited my turn at the plate. Even those bats labeled with the same length or weight felt different when held in one’s hands. Nearly negligible degrees of variation could cause each one to appear to have a distinct balance. The slightest disparity in the width of the bat’s handle could create greater or lesser comfort for the hitter when he stepped into his stance at the batter’s box. Any one of the bats could propel a baseball upon contact; however, whether as the consequence of an objective decision based upon the bat’s length and weight or a subjective choice made upon a player’s simple instinctive feel, each hitter felt better with the bat he’d selected, convinced the results would be beneficial.

For writers, perhaps particularly for poets, unusual details hidden deep in dictionary entries often have supplied pleasant surprises that enhance a word’s attraction for inclusion in an imaginary work of literature. Therefore, I was delighted by the sample poem highlighted today at Poetry Daily, Barbara Hamby’s “Ode on Dictionaries,” which originally appeared in Subtropics. I recommend this poem to all who have written a poem, who value those basic components that constitute our vocabulary, or who have wondered about any writer’s fascination with dictionaries.

In the poem Hamby recalls “the dictionary I bought / in the fourth grade, with so many gorgeous words I thought / I’d never plumb its depths.” Even now, so many years later, the poet discloses: “yet here I am still at it, trolling for pearls, / Japanese words vying with Bantu in a goulash / I eat daily, sometimes gagging, sometimes with relish, / kleptomaniac in the five-and-dime of language, / slipping words in my pockets like a non-smudge / lipstick that smears with the first kiss.” Reading these lines in Hamby’s wonderful poem, I thought once more of those days in my own history when I have spent time over lunch learning and loving words, being nourished by them.