Poem for Wednesday and Twin Peaks Country

Vocabulary 

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 the 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 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.

-------- 

My Wednesday was just as social as my Tuesday, but from home. I chatted with two of my high school friends in the morning, ate lunch with Paul, did a little bit of work, and watched some Rings of Power with Kristen and Laurie. Then we took a walk in beautiful weather to the beach, saw four eagles and many ducks, and came home for some chores and dinner. 

TV tonight was the season finale of Percy Jackson, which I didn't like as much as the first season, plus the new episode of Fallout, which has improved as the season has gone on, and this week's The Masked Singer, entertaining but they sent home two black performers while they kept the mediocre Snow Cone. More photos from Twin Peaks -- sawmill, sheriff's department, Dutchman's Lodge, Double R Diner!