Of course, I haven't got $1,000. Haven't got the space for 20 volumes, either, but I'd get rid of a chair if I had to. Instead, I started small. The fat paperback Oxford American Desk Dictionary and Thesaurus. Then I got the condensed, 2 (massive) volume $75.00 OED. That's when the hankering got really bad. I keep coming across ads, offerings, sales (imagine, for just $900 I can have the entire thing ... but I don't have $900 either).
I love dictionaries. Thesauri, too, if I'm going to make a full breast of it. I have numerous dictionaries, large and small, hardcover and paperback, etymological dictionaries, synonym and antonym dictionaries. Slang dictionaries. Foreign language dictionaries. American Heritage, Random House, Oxford, Websters and many more. Old and new. Dictionaries so old there is no reference to the atomic bomb. And so new they have entries for blogging (imagine that!).
But at the bottom of it all, its all about words.
It's rather like being a part of a secret society. We lust after words. We covet the dictionaries of others that are filled with words - words we crave. Words that, somehow, we can't truly touch or feel or experience unless we OWN them.
The legendary book about the compilation of the OED, The Professor and the Madman, details the initial operation that put together this massive undertaking and the sources from whence the selections were made (everyone was invited to suggest words for inclusion and one of the primary collaborators turned out to be a man sequestered in an insane asylum. And it continues to be a huge event - the annual revision of the OED. What words have evolved into a usage popular enough to warrant their inclusion in the bible of linguists? What words, sadly, have failed to meet that standard and must be abandoned? Arguments ensue. Debates proceed. There is always an American editor involved in the practice, but such jargon as applies to the internet, for example, and high-tech industries and current situations (witness the inclusion of WMD, after the misspent 8 years of the Bush presidency) will be included because of their popular appearance in everyday use.
Of course, sadly, not every word can be included. There are antiquated words - fun, amazing, ingenious words - that have been left out, abandoned by the literary wayside as the world moves on, embracing such words as are deemed au courant. Relevant. Can you imagine the number of volumes required to include every word in the English language that has ever been uttered or used? The words of Medieval London. Elizabethan London. 1776 US. 1100 Scotland. 1888 Dodge City. Words that will never be uttered again. Never be used in writing or known by the vocabulary-curious.
It makes me want to find those words. Investigate and unearth them and then use them. Speak them aloud. Write them down. Ensure that they will stay alive in the lexicographic universe. Prevent them from extinction. Even if it is only in my own mind that they live. Perhaps I will begin a journal. A word journal. A rescue mission, if you will, wherein I will record and save them. Keep the words safe for whosoever discovers my journals later. An alien, perhaps? Perhaps this being from another world will find my journal and believe these words to be the most important of words. Imagine a wealth of words disappearing, in favor of Middle English phrases, Regency slang or 1970's hip. Nodcock and groovy rule!
People whose business and hobby it is to study words - The Linguistic Society of America, for example - must lament these losses. Do they squirrel away old editions of dictionaries? Do they seek out the thesauri of days of yore? Are their homes repositories for a wealth of words?
I know I do my part. I have so many dictionaries and thesauri that I never want for a source for pronunciation, definition, etymology. And as I am my Mother's daughter, not a day goes by that I don't reach for one of these tomes. To look up a word, to confirm my belief about a tertiary definition of a word. To determine how, really, a word like "sepulchral" is pronounced. Or simply to find a word that means what I want to say more closely than any of the pedestrian choices that may immediately come to mind.
Am I peculiar? An oddity who would rather read a dictionary than watch a QVC show? Someone who would prefer to investigate a linguistical mystery than figure out who will be voted off the island?
Perhaps. But I am not alone. There are many others, however secluded and hidden. Subscribers to the magazine, Verbatim. Crossword puzzle afficianados. Writers. Poets. Scrabble players. People such as Ammon Shea, who spent an entire year reading the unabridged OED, cover to cover, wading through the "uns", the interminable "s" section - but who found a veritable treasure trove of knowledge about words, their use, their origin and his affinity for certain ones that just, well, tickled his fancy.
So I am in good company. Weirdos, one and all, but hey, weirdos with most excellent vocabularies.
Ka-ching.
Can you hear that? It's my new OED piggy bank. I'm saving up. One farthing, yen, Euro, deutschmark, penny, quid, pence, buck, franc - at a time.
