Verbal beauty – in the ear of the listener

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, dictionaries, phonaesthetics, word lists

I bought Dictionary of the Strange, Curious, & Lovely, by Robin Devoe, on Amazon, as a way of adding a low-cost purchase to my Cart to push it over $25 and get free shipping. I am one of those odd people who can read in a dictionary for pleasure. Since the title included the word "lovely" I first looked for "cellar door", which has a long history of being considered the most beautiful-sounding word (or phrase) in English. The lovely sound of "cellar door" has been remarked upon by such literary lights as H.L. Mencken and  J.R.R. Tolkien, who coined the word "phonaesthetics" for the interest in lovely-sounding words.

"Cellar door" is not found in this collection. Neither is "tintinnabulation" (coined by Poe), one of my favorites. And while I'm at it, a collection of my own would include "surfeit" (the S-R-F series is quite pleasing; ask any surfer!) and "flabbergasterisk", which describes a step beyond the ordinary "!" by replacing the dot with an asterisk.

However, this book was written by Robin Devoe, not by me, so it's author's choice. Not all the words are necessarily "lovely". It's clear he (or she?) was more devoted to "strange" and "curious". Also rare.

After that first peek, I found that the book is entirely without apparatus. No table of contents nor page numbers; an index would be superfluous and useless, so none of that; but I'd like to have seen a preface or introduction. But No: After a page of non-introductory introduction and the requisite copyright page, the book is a word list with scanty definitions (and no more than a couple of dozen scantier etymologies), followed by a supplementary word list; also, thankfully, a few blank endpapers, which I used for record-keeping. 

Being rather geeky, I added page numbers as I went and made my own table of contents, seen here. There was room for it on the copyright page. Sampling several pages I found that the 143 whole pages included about 24.5 words each, and the 144th page had four words, ending in "zymurgy", another word I like. That comes to just over 3,500 words. So far so good.

Beginning on page 144 we find a list of Supplementary Words of Beauty or Interest, about 600 of them. And it is just a list, of five or six words per line.

As I went I marked each word I knew already. This copy of page 32 shows an example. The little "q" next to "culex" indicates that I had a question. I knew that Culex is a genus of mosquito, one of 112 mosquito genera. Gnats are not mosquitoes, being in a different subfamily of the Diptera (two-winged flies). It didn't take long to be certain that the author had got this one wrong. This is not quite a blunder, because culex is the Latin word for "gnat", chosen by Linnaeus to distinguish a genus of small mosquito species, in his original classification of "all life" in 1758.

I kept track of how many words I'd marked on each page. They added up to 1,017 of the 3,500+ words, or 29%.

I considered checking the supplementary list of 600 words; a quick skim showed that I know more than 90% of those. I didn't go further.

I did find myself wondering how the author gathered the words. Was it a years-long endeavor? Was there a session of hunting through the Oxford English Dictionary for the least-used words (those with the shortest entries)? A little of both?

The copyright page shows the book is not copyrighted by the author, but by Rob Earl. Another mystery. The page lists a website, www.cloudskiing.com, which doesn't exist (maybe it did in 2017).

Of course, unless you share my logophilic affliction, this isn't a book to read, but one to browse. Who knows, maybe we can add a word or two to our working vocabulary, except then when we use a new word and get a blank stare in reply, we have to explain it.