Sam Arons
An Itinerant Dictionary
I have a confession to make: I am addicted to dictionaries. You know how some people are mystery novel people, some are non-fiction people, and some read Playboy — for the articles, of course — ? Well, I am a dictionary person. No need to feel sorry for me; I’ve already come to terms with the fact that I’m just a huge geek. Any dictionary will do, really — an English dictionary, a Swahili dictionary, “My Baby’s First Picture Dictionary,” the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics ... I just can’t help myself. In bookstores, I inevitably gravitate towards the reference section, and at the library I’ll sit for hours staring longingly at a Japanese dictionary instead of doing work. I’m a compulsive dictionary buyer — once, on a trip to Canada, I bought a French to Inuktitut dictionary because I didn’t think I’d ever be able to find one in the U.S.
Why this obsession with dictionaries? Well, I’ve noticed that in the course of day-to-day events, there often arise situations in which it is useful to have a dictionary on hand. What would you do, for example, if someone asked you how to translate “tea pot” into Hungarian? You’d grab your pocket ... [takes out a bunch of dictionaries] ... Hungarian-English dictionary and nonchalantly reply, “teáskanna, of course.” Or what if the future of international politics hinged on an argument between a Quebecois and an Inuit about the relative merits of hand-built vs. pre-fabricated igloos? Worldwide trade would grind screechingly to a halt — except for the fact that you, you sly devil, remembered your French-Inuktitut dictionary and resolved the dispute to set world affairs back on track.
Without a dictionary, I might never know that the word “hobo” derives from the purported call of greeting between vagrants of “Ho! Beau!” (that’s B-E-A-U, by the way). Without a dictionary, I wouldn’t know that it’s actually okay to use the words “shuttlecock,” “pimpernel,” “invaginate,” and “blowhard” on a stage like this one. Or consider a recent dinner conversation over a meal at the dining hall. You know how you can never really tell what they put in some of those dishes? One person thought the secret ingredient in the meatloaf was mango — and someone else thought it tasted a little more like poison ivy. Feeling curious, I opened my dictionary to page ... 529 and suddenly understood the source of the confusion: poison ivy and the mango are members of the same plant family! You see what kind of great stuff you can learn from a dictionary? Now, next time I’m hiking in the woods and start feeling hungry, I know I can chow down on a nice sprig of poison ivy and everything will be just fine, because really, it’s just mango.
Given my feelings towards these objects of endless reference, you can imagine my surprise when I wandered into the Williams C entry last week and there, perched on the edge of a recycling bin, was this [holds up dictionary]. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Do you realize what this is? This is the Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary — 2,129 pages of raw linguistic power. This baby has everything you could ever want in a dictionary: an all-leather exterior, solid chrome lettering, inline-6 finger tabs, disc brakes, snow tires, a power index, and a trunk so large it has space for words like "hippopoto-monstro-sesquipedalian" and “pneumono-ultra-microscopic-silico-volcanoco-niosis.” I know what you’re thinking. “So what? Big deal! The Oxford English Dictionary, with its 20 volumes, is way bigger than that thing.” True, true — but, consider this: while those Brits are over there worrying about the size of their ... vocabularies and trying to make up for it with a set of inflated desk references, we Americans figured out long ago how to pack the same punch into a much more efficient package.
But anyway, asking around the Williams C entry, I soon discovered that this dictionary had been living quite the itinerant life. It started out in the philosophy department, was discarded and picked up by a student who took it to the Frosh Quad, and proceeded to migrate from common room to common room until it ended up in the recycling bin on move-out day. And as I took it home and sat there trying to sew a giant new pocket onto the seat of my pants so that I could have this thing accessible in any linguistic emergency, I began to realize how much this dictionary’s life has paralleled our own. We, too, arrived on campus, wandered between dorms, departments, dining halls — and we, too, felt at times as if we were perched precariously on the edge of some gigantic recycling bin. [pause]
Now is the time when I’m supposed to extend this metaphor even further, and talk about how each of us, in a way, has a little dictionary inside of us or something. But I’m not going to do that. I could talk about how, right now, at this very instant, we’re sitting in alphabetical order, from Abba and Ackerly to Zuckerwise and Zunino, arranged like some big dictionary of the Class of 2004. But no, I’m going to talk about that either. Because the fact of the matter is, folks, that we are more than just dictionaries. It’s shocking to hear, I know — but it’s true. You see, dictionaries are just words arranged arbitrarily in a list, with no more relation between them than the accident of their spellings. But we, over the course our four years here, have learned how to do more than just spell: we can take words and fit them together in new ways — we can write paragraphs. Short, snappy, pithy paragraphs about any number of subjects. You might even call them very brief articles. So really, we’re not like dictionaries at all. No — we are, together, a collection or short articles. That’s right: we are not dictionaries — we are one big ... encyclopedia.
June 6, 2004