One shovelful at a time

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, lexicography, memoirs, obsessions

In a dearth of faith, how is one to move a mountain? One shovelful at a time. Depending on the "mountain", I suppose we are fortunate that this or that person might find such shoveling enjoyable: it is a tough job, but someone has to do it.

As to obsessive reading, the "shoveler" I have in mind is Ammon Shea, who has read through the Oxford English Dictionary (the OED), as he writes, "so that you don't have to." The OED has 21,730 pages and nearly sixty million words of print. To read it in a single year, one must read 418 pages each week: nearly sixty pages every seven days or more than eighty pages daily if one takes weekends off…and those are rather large pages!

Shea finished reading through the OED in July, 2007. Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 pages is his memoir of the experience, with a nifty sampling of words that struck his fancy. During that year, his eyes got worse (he had to procure eyeglasses after the first few weeks), his skin got paler (ten hours daily in a library basement), he became composed of coffee (a quart or so daily), and he learned that blinding headaches do eventually go away. And, he writes, he loved the experience.

I sympathize with him about halfway. I do read dictionaries and encyclopedias for enjoyment … from time to time (There is one dictionary that I have read from cover to cover, but it is far smaller than the OED). It seems that at least for the past ten years, Shea has read nearly nothing except dictionaries. His girlfriend is a professional lexicographer. He has a collection of hundreds of dictionaries, and is in awe of an older friend named Madeleine who has thousands.

It is the existence and work of people like Alix, the author's girlfriend, that makes this all possible. The oldest half or better of the OED is the work of James Murray, who famously defined a lexicographer as "a harmless drudge." Thirty-four years of his life, and a much greater sum of years for hundreds of other people, went into producing the massive, twenty-volume work (to find out more, see The OED Online. It is not free to use, but a "word of the day" is offered freely; today's word is downthrow, whose current meaning is overthrow or usurp, except in Geology, where its meaning is more literal. They have, literally, a million more where that came from).

Let's see: iatrogenic, impedimenta, matutinal, painstaker, peccability, recrudescence, sitzfleisch, upchuck, wailer, xerostomia. These ten comprise a few percent of the "interesting" words that Ammon Shea has offered up, with short definitions and his own quirky commentary, to accompany each of his 26 chapters. These ten are all the ones that I already knew.

I cannot say that now I have learned a few hundred new words, for two reasons: Firstly, many of the words denote stuff I don't think of as needing a word. For example, nefandous means "too odious to be spoken of". When "the kid" points and says, "What is that?" we don't reply that it is nefandous, we say, "Hush, it isn't polite to point," or "I'll tell you when you get older," hoping the tyke will forget all about it. Secondly, many, many words are so out of date they haven't been used for generations and some have been replaced. A great many are rather forgettable anyway. Thus, nobody today mentions charientism, since tact is now current, and is loads easier to pronounce.

This points up the greatest attraction and value of the OED, and why it should be taken in larger amounts than just looking up a definition. It is a historical record of hundreds of thousands of words, whether current or not, particularly of how each has been used throughout its history of usage in print. While upchuck is a mere fifty years old, mumpish was used for being sullenly angry for some three hundred years before being replaced by sulky a generation or two ago, and many a word still in use, such as amorous, is little changed from a Latin word of twenty centuries past.

Shea mentions that seven words are defined as hiera picra, with no further explanation. I hope he has since found that this term means "priestly bitters" and refers to a certain type of traditional medicinal dose.

Now that he has finished reading the OED and written this enjoyable book about it, can you guess what he'd like to do next? You got it: to read it again, but more slowly. His web site doesn't mention if he's doing it.