I'm reading through the entire Oxford English Dictionary, and this blog is a record of all the interesting words I find.
Wow. That's it! I can't believe my own brevity! Already, you've decided in your head between "What an interesting project!" or "What an interminable bore!"
(my guess is, if you used the word interminable in your head, you'll probably find this project quite interesting)
So this is the deal: Every day I'm going to read a portion of the OED, and every day I'm going to post one word that I found interesting. I will post the word, its etymology and its definition. I may or may not also post a paragraph or two on why I find that word interesting (probably more likely than not - I've been told I like the sound of my own keyboard).
I promise no rhyme or reason as to why a word might make it to Lexicolatry; there's no specific criteria. I might like the sound, its etymology, its meaning, its obscurity; who knows? All I know is that I will have found it interesting, and I hope that you find it interesting too.
I've read the dictionary before. In my late teens I read through the entire Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary. It's not quite the OED, but it's still a sizeable tome, and I still cherish my battered and annotated copy that I pored through and carried with me wherever I went all those years ago.
I get mixed reactions when I tell people that I've read the entire dictionary. They range from "Wow! You must be the smartest guy in the world!" to "Wow! You must be a complete moron!" Others have asked me if that means I know every single word in the English language and if I'm a genius at games like Scrabble (I don't and I'm not). Probably the most common question people ask is just "Why?"
I love words and I love dictionaries.
To a fellow logophile, this love is obvious, natural and inevitable. To someone that doesn't share this, I can see how it would be difficult to understand, just as I struggle to see how someone could spend hours poring over, say, stamps or iPhone apps
For me, however, words are so much more than tools to simply transmit what is going on inside our heads and hearts to the outside world. Words also have shapes, patterns, forms, colours, tones, emotions and beauty. They carry shades and subtlety of meaning that are truly breathtaking. Words can be used to inspire or crush, elevate or debase, heal or destroy.
Words are beautiful.
Dictionaries, too, are supremely useful. Your wordy boss or teacher has marked your most recent work as
asinine; a dictionary will tell you whether you should be celebrating your forthcoming promotion / scholarship or considering a different career path, at the very least one with a more constructive boss or teacher.
More than being purely
utilitarian, however, they are staggering feats of work and human thinking. For whatever reason, words (and familiar words at that) are often exceptionally hard to define. Take the following newspaper headline:
Financial crisis deepens in the Eurozone
It's a sentiment we're likely used to reading on a daily basis. There's no ambiguity about any of it; any native speaker of English understands exactly what is being expressed, both by the words individually and the sentence as a whole. But try, off the top of your head, to define the word crisis. Once you've come up with what you believe to be a satisfactory definition, compare it to the definition in a good dictionary. Now imagine the work and thought that went into that dictionary definition stretched upon the tens of thousands of words in the English language.
The gap between our seemingly inherent understanding of a word and the monumental task in actually setting its definition to paper is brilliantly expressed in the classic episode of Blackadder
Ink and Incapability. In it, Blackadder accidentally destroys the only copy of Dr Samuel Johnson's recently completed dictionary, a work that has taken him ten years to complete. Fearing for his life, Blackadder sets about rewriting the entire dictionary in one night with the help of Baldrick and the Prince Regent. Immediately, they come unstuck on defining the pronoun 'a'. After some head scratching, the best definition they can come up with is:
A
Impersonal pronoun
Doesn't really mean anything
Granted, the Prince Regent was particularly inept at, well, just about everything, but how many of us can do much better at defining a word as simple as 'a'? And yet none of us have the least problem in using it and understanding it every day of our lives.
So, whether you follow my journey through the dictionary every single day or just dip in and out of it every now and then, I do hope you enjoy something from Lexicolatry (stick with it if only to witness the point at which I realise what a monumental project I've misunderestimated). I will be posting a word daily, and perhaps the occasional language-related article or progress report (on Sundays, I think).
Please feel free to leave any comments on any page, be they why you like a word, how you've used it today, where you've seen it or heard it, or why you positively dislike a word and wish it could be stricken from the language and banished into obscurity forever!
Here's to words and dictionaries, and I do hope you enjoy Lexicolatry with me.
Many thanks for reading,
Eddie
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The Tools of Lexicolatry
Principally, I will be using the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary with possible cross-referencing to the Chambers dictionary
Also, a yellow marker, a pen, and lots of Earl Grey tea |