Stephen Doty
March, 2016
This article was published here:
On Reading the Dictionary
Charlie Chaplin kept a dictionary in his bathroom.1 J.L. Austin did philosophy with one, listing the words we use when making excuses.2 Eminem read one to find ammunition for his lyrics and battles.3 And it can spare you the sort of embarrassment a young Jerry Lewis felt when he cheered after the doctor said his grandmother “expired.”
I began reading one to avoid getting baffled by BS. I had heard a defense lawyer declare that a detective was guilty of “defalcations and spoliation.” Afterwards, I discovered neither word was apt. A small vocabulary leads to staircase wit. Worse, you could be insulted without knowing it. Imagine a politician in a debate asked if he’s an expert at mendacity & perfidy. We did not grow up using such words, so as adults they can seem like a second language.
Nearly every use of these words seems to me like someone donning false plumes: mare’s nest, ubiquitous, untoward, ontological, plethora, quotidian. And any subtle misuse can backfire, revealing an affectation. Someone desperate to use vis-a-vis at every job interview is in trouble.
The idea behind reading the dictionary is not to start using fancy words yourself, but to avoid being imposed upon when others do.
Selection & Reading
Any well-known dictionary will do. After comparing a few via test words, such as austere, I chose the pocket Webster’s New World (2003).4 It provides etymologies and has well-written definitions. All 753 pages can be read in fifty-four weeks at the rate of two pages per day. It will improve your spelling and vocabulary, reacquaint you with forgotten favorites, and present a window to our vast world.5
A few things you will notice along the way:
1. Many everyday words have no known etymology (root word), yet function as well as the rest: fake, jerk, bamboozle, humbug, prank, nincompoop, malarkey, cavort. Therefore, college graduates use schooling as a cane to beat those smarter than they are whenever they say etymology is essential to understanding a word’s true or real meaning.
There is no real meaning to a word – only various senses established by its use in our language-game (Sprachspiel), as Ludwig Wittgenstein used the term.6 And the most recent senses are listed last. The words juice, drag, fine, line, set, airy have such diverse senses that each word itself is actually sense-less without a context, which is what J.L. Austin meant when he wrote, “what alone has meaning is a sentence.”7
Some words have an etymology at odds with their everyday meanings: hectic from habit; terrific from to frighten; December from ten; swastika from the Sanskrit symbol for well-being.
Yet, most commonly, words are derived from others that are still in harmony with their current senses: mellifluous from honey & to flow; martyr from witness; sinecure from without care; zest from orange peel; sabotage from wooden shoe & damage; denim from the town of its manufacture, de Nimes; precise from before & to cut – yes, the need for precision before incision. Etymology is like a historical fact about a small town.
2. It all seems so arbitrary – the spellings and whether to introduce a new word or to extend the sense of an existing one. We use the single word tumbler to mean three very different things: an acrobat, a drinking glass, and part of a lock – and toner to mean both a skin astringent and photocopy ink. Yet the senses of port and bay are fragmented among five different words each, called homographs. In this way, the history of words seems like the history of law, which, as Justice Holmes said, has not been logic but experience.8
3. Some words still have two correct spellings: extol/extoll; cancelled/canceled; largess/largesse. And some have two correct pronunciations: banal, caramel.
4. We tend to think that the literal sense of a word is primary, while the figurative sense is secondary. But many words are almost always used figuratively now: bookworm, veiled, venom, jackass.
5. We may overlook the backside of slang. As new words are introduced, others are left idle, yet remain in print dictionaries: grass widow, woolgathering, wag, demimonde, (his) nibs, whence, cocker, gamin, wimple, weal, hale, cat’s-paw, pellucid, fen, coolie. Recall, if you can, the last time you heard any of those words spoken during the last 20 years.
6. Some definitions in a print edition will be incomplete, which is instructive. It indicates not error usually, but how word usage is evolving. In mine, these words lacked their modern senses: diva, butt, booty, blowout, doormat. This shows the benefit of consulting online dictionaries at times, such as Urbandictionary.com.
7. Some definitions will seem silly – ragbag is “a bag for rags,” homespun is “spun at home” – and others, insightful: justice is “reward or penalty as deserved”; conscience is “a sense of right and wrong, with an urge to do right”; charisma is “a special quality in one that inspires devotion or fascination.”
8. What word has two opposite senses? Peruse. It means “to read carefully; study” and “to read in a leisurely way.” So if someone says he perused your letter, you can’t be sure what he did.
9. What is the only lexical word, not an abbreviation or a symbol, that has no vowels and no Y? Psst.
Summing Up
Reading the dictionary confers the benefits Francis Bacon noted of studies generally: “for delight, for ornament, and for ability.”9 Single words trigger associations, e.g., Shecky Greene once alerted a Chinese waiter with psst, psst – and the waiter said it was rude, since that was the chef, not him; his name was Click Click.10
The dictionary is really a history book. It contains a finite set of words, invented for practical purposes, which have survived not via edict, but via choices made over generations. And if words are just tools for thinking, one can be more productive with more and better tools. Steven Pinker has noted that, over the decades, our rising IQ’s have correlated with our expanding vocabularies, and new words “make it easier to think.”11
1 Louise Brooks, Lulu in Hollywood (Minneapolis: U of Minn. Press, 1982) xli. In 1925, at age19, in New York, Brooks had an affair with Charlie Chaplin for two months and said, “He was a self-made aristocrat… he kept a dictionary in the bathroom at his hotel so that he could learn a new word every morning.”
2 J.L. Austin, Philosophical Papers 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford, 1979) 186. He said one way to use the dictionary is “to read the book through, listing all the words that seem relevant; this does not take as long as many suppose.”
3 Eminem interviewed on the TV show 60 Minutes: https://youtu.be/4hr0Q-x-QNM
4 Webster’s New World Dictionary 4th ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003).
5 Austin, Papers 182: “we are looking again not merely at words… but also at the realities we use the words to talk about; we are using a sharpened awareness of words to sharpen our perception of, though not as the final arbiter of, the phenomena.”
6 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 3rd ed., trans. G. Anscombe (Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2003) #7: “I shall call the whole, consisting of language, and the actions into which it is woven… ‘Sprachspiel'” and P. 187: “Let the use of words teach you their meaning.”
7 Austin, Papers 56: “to say a word or a phrase has a meaning is to say that there are sentences in which it occurs which have meanings.”
8 O.W. Holmes Jr., The Common Law (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963 orig. 1881) 5.
9 Francis Bacon, The Essays (New York: Penguin, 1985) 209.
10 http://youtu.be/HrYwbDfSsdE
11 S. Pinker, The Sense of Style (New York: Viking, 2014) 239.