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.

Decoding botany

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, botany, nomenclature, dictionaries

Do you think you want to be a botanist? The prime asset to beginning a botanical career is a classical education. That's right, the Trivium (Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric) and the Quadrivium (Arithmetic, Geometry, Music and Astronomy). And Grammar, including both Latin and Greek vocabulary, was traditionally taught in Latin; "grammar" is the study of the Latin rules of sentence construction. In fact, prior to the mid-19^th Century, all seven subjects were taught in Latin. This would not be a bad idea today, particularly for anyone entering a biological science.

For those of us who prefer a more glancing acquaintance with formal botany, at least a course or two in Latin and Greek vocabulary would be a big help. Then, if you want just a smattering of "latinate" word knowledge, you would do well to read through Latin for Gardeners: Over 3,000 Plant Names Explained and Explored by Lorraine Harrison. The core of the book is a dictionary listing of the 3,000 or so terms with very brief meanings. For example, a few items from the "F" pages:

fenestralis fen-ESS-tra-lis
fenestralis, fenestrale
With openings like a window, as in Vriesia fenestralis

fibrillosus fy-BRIL-oh-sus
fibrillosa, fibrillosum
fibrosus fy-BROH-sus
fibrosa, fibrosum
Fibrous, as in Dicksonia fibrosa

Certain prefixes are also shown, including

multi-
Used in compound words to denote many

poly-
Used in compound words to denote many

I picked a pair that includes one from Latin and one from Greek; both are used. It would have helped just a bit more if the author noted that multi- is from Latin and poly- is from Greek. A simple L and G in the listing would do. 3,000 of those would not take up much extra space. A regular rule, not always followed, is to use a Latin prefix with a Latin determiner and so with Greek. An example that keeps the rule is polycarpus; -carpus is from Greek for a fruit or seed pod, but originally meant "wrist". Your carpal bones reside in your wrists and the back of your hands. A plant named polycarpus has many fruits.

If this were only a dictionary it would be pretty dry fare. But the author has included biographical notes on 15 "plant hunters" (AKA explorers) and 20 plant genera such as Helianthus and Quercus (sunflower and oak). There is also a small "Latin in Action" blurb every 3-4 pages, and short essays on "plant themes" that include groups of words related to, for example, color or fragrance. I would like to have seen a section just on the prefixes and suffixes, perhaps even a matrix or table showing the many suffixes that go with each prefix, by means of a check mark or block. A big lack is explanation of Genera. Only 20 are described, and Delphinium, for example, is not one of them. How to know the word is derived from "Dolphin"?

All that aside, it is a good book to keep handy for looking up the meaning of a species name. Quercus rubra? Aha! Red oak! If you want to dig deeper into Biological Latin (quite distinct from Classical Latin or the Church Latin all Roman Catholics had to learn until about 1975), a good place to start is this BayGardens article, and the links it contains.

The reference shelf gets longer

kw: books, dictionaries, references

I mentioned about a week ago that I would be bringing home a few more dictionaries and other reference books as I clean out my office. My last day actually at the office has come and gone, I got home early, and I've been rearranging the shelves in my home office ever since.

As you can see, the big Webster's New 20^th Century (unabridged) sits below where the shelf space is high enough. All the others are above. I count 9 English dictionaries among a number of other reference works. The white tag on the newest CRC Handbook indicates it was a library discard when they got a newer edition – fortunately this library doesn't tear the covers off its discards!

These aren't the only shelves I've been working on; I have two 6-shelf built-ins and a number of other shelving units in this room. About a third of the total space still needs attention. I took a couple of boxes of lesser-used books to my son's old bedroom. He can sort through them and keep or discard as he likes. Is it really possible to de-clutter a whole house during one's natural lifetime?

Third time is the charm, ain't it

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, dictionaries, short biographies, lexicography

When I was a kid, we'd sometimes poke fun at someone's diction by chanting, "'Ain't' ain't a word 'cause it ain't in the dictionary." Then in my sophomore year, the high school library obtained a copy of the latest "big dictionary," Webster's Third International (to use its short title). Some smart aleck or other looked in it right away, and came running out to say, "Hey, now 'ain't' is in the dictionary!" We all had to run in to see. Sure enough, big as life:

I crept back in later and checked in a few other dictionaries, something I had not considered doing before. Surprise! "Ain't" was in each and every one!! The new dictionary was remarkable only in what it left out: a notification that "ain't" was colloquial, or substandard, or "to be deprecated", and though it did say "disapproved by many", it seemed to approve, noting its use by "many cultivated speakers". As a much-abused nerdy kid, I knew well enough to keep that discovery to myself.

Unbeknownst to all of us kids, the publication of Webster's Third (W3) by the Merriam Co. triggered a controversy that is still not quite over. A debate or dispute is a short-term affair, but a controversy can go on and on, particularly when it touches on matters of tradition. Then, like the centuries-long arguments about the Trinity, the self-worth of touchy intellectuals gets called into question, and the fray outlasts the original participants.

The scope of the W3 controversy is ably canvassed by David Skinner in The Story of Ain't: America, its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published. It is no spoiler to mention that anti-W3 material has been published as recently as 2011, a full fifty years after the dictionary was issued. This book is neither pro- nor anti-W3, but is rather a history of the making of the volume, and the story of the principal characters surrounding it.

About the first half of the book's 40 chapters consist of mini-biographies of more than twenty men, and a woman or two. The central figures in the drama are Philip Gove, editor of W3, and Dwight Macdonald, who wrote the most damning (and still quoted) attack upon it. Equally important are William A. Nielson, who edited the predecessor volume (W2) that was issued in 1934, and Charles C. Fries, a pioneer of scientific linguistics. Ordinarily, I am quite put off by biography (I very seldom read one), but Skinner has woven the little biographies together in a most readable way. I still found that it took me a few extra days to read.

Scientific Linguistics remains a difficult issue, partly because no two linguists agree on just what it is. Some years ago a friend of mine was working towards a PhD in linguistics, under a professor who is a structuralist, and claims that as the most scientific approach. C.C. Fries would have damned him for ignoring empirical data about current usage in favor of theories about "generation" of language as promoted by Noam Chomsky. Philip Gove followed Fries's lead (by the way, grammarians are an equally contentious breed, and some would condemn me for that apostrophe-s, claiming the proper possessive is Fries'), basing his instructions to contributors on empiricism.

Where earlier dictionaries, particularly W2, sought to be normative or even prescriptive, Gove in W3 sought instead to embody competent reportage of the English language as American's speak it. This led to a bit of clumsiness because all the illustrative examples are from written, even published, material. But how else can one obtain historical usage? Unlike the Oxford English Dictionary, which traced each word to its earliest use, W3 used history as a springboard to the present, emphasizing current (as of 1960) American English.

In the later chapters that report on the controversy that erupted in 1961, we find that most of those complaining about it compared W3 to an imaginary W2, not having checked to see that most of their bugaboos were right there in W2 also! Yet W3 is definitely not some slightly-altered clone of W2. It is quite different. W2 was not only prescriptive, it also resembled a one-volume encyclopedia, whereas W3 stuck to defining words, not discoursing at length on the item a word "meant". This was by design, and controversy or no, it has influenced dictionary making ever since. I find that the Collins (also called a Webster's) Unabridged on my desk, published in 1979, owes much to Gove's approach, and defines by reporting.

The way we learn language is by imitation. A dictionary doesn't need to prescribe to influence. We who use them do so to learn what is not just normal or normative, but what is ordinary, because only by using a word in its ordinary sense(s) can we be understood, at least in expository prose. In more creative work, it can be salutary to stretch the meaning of a word, but most of what I write is instructional, and being understood is primary. New words and new meanings arise from children and poets; once they are established, the rest of us can use them for the everyday purpose of communication.