By Jason Schneiderman
I used to love words,
but not looking them up.
Now I love both,
the knowing,
and the looking up,
the absurdity
of discovering that "boreal"
has been meaning
"northern" all this time
or that "estrus"
is a much better word
for the times when
I would most likely
have said, "in heat."
When I was translating,
the dictionary
was my enemy,
the repository of knowledge
that I seemed incapable
of retaining. The foreign word
for "inflatable" simply
would not stay in my head,
though the English word "deictic,"
after just one encounter,
has stuck with me for a year.
I once lost "desiccated"
for a decade, first encountered
in an unkind portrayal
of Ronald Reagan, and then
finally returned to me
in an article about cheese.
I fell in love with my husband,
not when he told me
what the word "apercus" means,
but when I looked it up,
and he was right.
There's even a word
for when you use a word
not to mean its meaning,
but as a word itself,
and I'd tell you what it was
if I could remember it.
My friend reads the dictionary
for its perspective on culture,
laughs when I say that
reference books are not really
books, but proleptic databases.
My third grade teacher
used to joke that if we were bored
we could copy pages out of the dictionary,
but when I did, also as a joke,
she was horrified rather than amused.
Discovery is always tinged
with sorrow, the knowledge
that you have been living
without something,
so we try to make learning
the province of the young,
who have less time to regret
having lived in ignorance.
My students are lost
in dictionaries,
unable to figure out why
"categorize" means
"to put into categories"
or why the fifth definition
of "standard" is the one
that will make the sentence
in question make sense.
I wonder how anyone
can live without knowing
the word "wonder."
A famous author
once said in an interview,
that he ended his novel
with an obscure word
he was sure his reader
would not know
because he liked the idea
of the reader looking it up.
He wanted the reader,
upon closing his book, to open
another, that second book
being a dictionary,
and however much I may have loved
that author, after reading
that story
(and this may surprise you)
I loved him less.
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I spent Tuesday doing work and chores (laundry will get folded Wednesday, I promise) and upcycling some of the jewelry I bought Monday at Claire's. Adam had his two math/science finals for the semester, then came home early and was in and out exercising and walking the neighbor's dog. Paul came home early so we could go to Germantown to have dinner with his parents at IHOP and retrieve Daniel from them (we arrived before them, so we stopped in the beautiful new library there).
We had a weird amount of time when we got home -- had to fax some mortgage-related papers and things like that -- and wound up putting on Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy just because it was ending right around when The Daily Show started. I hadn't watched it in months and had forgotten how brilliant it is, every single cast member -- Oldman, Firth, Strong, Cumberbatch, Hardy, Jones, Hurt. Here are some photos from the B&O Railroad Museum in Ellicott City on Sunday:
The rear of Ellicott City's B&O train station and still-in-operation tracks.
Interpreter in the station master's room...
...and cat on the station master's bed.
The large Thomas the Tank Engine train display for the holidays...
...the enormous multi-level Lego display...
...the small N-scale train in the old ticketing booth...
...and the large permanent reproduction of the historical local railroad (complete with Civil War encampment) in the freight house.
Here is my family out back by the circa 1927 caboose.
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