When’s the last time you looked up the word “dictionary” in the dictionary?
I guess that’d be slightly like looking into a mirrorful of mirrors, but on reading Ange Mlinko’s review of new books of poems in the January issue of Poetry , I thought it might be helpful; as she writes, “Rare it is to find such a neat convergence in the dead center of two new collections: both Mary Kinzie’s California Sorrow and Robert Pinsky’s Gulf Music intersect at the poet’s oracle, the dictionary.” What poet doesn’t love an oracle?

So, bookworm that I am, I turned to the office copy of the exceptionally oracular Oxford English Dictionary, whose citations for the D-word were quite entertaining. One is from Emerson, who sagely reflected that “Neither is the dictionary a bad book to read… it is full of suggestions, – the raw material of possible poems and histories.” But his contemporary, the Congregationalist pastor R.W. Dale (in a sermon published in 1858), remarked ruefully that “A dictionary is not merely a home for living words; it is a hospital for the sick; it is a cemetery for the dead.” That’s certainly akin to Kinzie contemplating “words as ghosts of all who used them but are passed away,” or Pinsky musing about the word thing: “the very word . . . is an artifact, with a secret shroud or aura.” At some point, the dictionary seems to have gotten a bit of a bad reputation, as in this phrase the OED cites from an 1818 letter of Mary Russell Mitford’s: “after the fashion of certain dictionary-mongers who ring the changes upon two words…” or this, from Orwell’s Burmese Days: “Have you swallowed a dictionary? … We shall have to sack this fellow if he gets to talk English too well.” Some citations even illustrate the idea of someone being a dictionary, as in this 1893 cite: “Mr. Edwards is a perfect walking dictionary…”
It’s a sobering thought that we didn’t really have English-language dictionaries till the 16th century, and though there were some in the 17th, it wasn’t until Samuel Johnson’s famous Dictionary of the English Language of 1755 that anyone systematically tried to correlate particular English words with the way they were actually used in literature. It probably took that long because there’s something irresolvably slippery about the idea of looking up the meaning of words in the a book made out of them: if you look up “word” in Johnson’s dictionary, you find definitions like “language” and “a single part of speech.” Fortunately, you also get his own marvelous citations, like Bacon’s “If you speak three words, it will three times report you the three words.” And if all that’s not puzzling enough, Mlinko notes that since neither Kinzie nor Pinsky “identifies the particular dictionary they are quoting” in their new poems, “they really do mystify the concept, which has a vexed history of its own—there is no ‘dictionary,’ there are only dictionaries.”
QED.

01.09.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

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