~a column by Colleen O’Brien
I just finished a great book – and having gone through several weeks of a trying time finding a great one, I was more than ready. This one is called “The Dictionary of Lost Words.” It’s not new but a 2020 book, author, Pip Williams. Her title brought up to me the ‘Lost Boys’ from Peter Pan. Something enticing about lost words and lost boys. The mystery of it. How do boys and words get lost?
I can understand boys; they are inquisitive, naturally forgetful of motherly admonitions, and often fearless. Their getting lost is a given and mostly only lost in time – the creeks and the snakes and the paths leading nowhere.
But words? I lose words on a regular basis, but I’m not talking about the inability to come up with the word I want; I’m talking about all the decisions made in the assemblage of words to keep or “lose” them.
Sometimes it was a matter of space: what word is less important than the next? Sometimes it was because the dictionary makers didn’t have enough references to use in the definition of a word. And there is the case in which some of the processors of words disliked a word – its look on the page, its sound, its meaning – that they managed to drop the slip of paper somewhere.
Many of the words remain with us. We learn them from our family or the neighborhood kids, which means words from our mother’s and father’s childhood and back and back and back. Often words were refused entrance to a new dictionary being researched because they were smutty [example, the F-bomb, which is a word that’s been around for as long as England’s been on a map. I recall being annoyed when I looked it up in the big book in the library, only to find it couldn’t be found. It’s in dictionaries now, although its presence is so ubiquitous, I doubt Kindergarteners are unaware of it. Currently the dictionaries now feel obligated also to include the varieties of the word, of which there are probably hundreds; even today’s dictionaries must leave out things.]
In The Dictionary of Lost Words, Esme, main character, began to save the discarded words even as she wrote down words used at the marketplace. This was an entirely different land from the land of dictionary-making a mere half mile away. The sellers at market were people who did not go to school for long, if at all. They lived modestly or in poverty beneath middle class knowledge. Esme knew she couldn’t get their words in the book, but she saved them anyway in a trunk, especially the words that had to do with women. For example, the word trade meant prostitution to the street folks, but the prostitute definition would not be in the big book under trade. She kept it for her trunk. She learned early on, as she edited definitions for the chosen words, that a dictionary was about men, not women.
When Esme wrote down a word from the market’s rag lady or a saying from the flower seller, she had them sign their name if they could, wrote it for them if they couldn’t. This small little act gave them a pride they never could have dreamed of – that they might be in a book someday. It was also a brag in daily life and sometime to bolster them when they were at their lowest.
This is a character-driven novel, the kind in which I learned about human behavior, which is what most of us are interested in anyway. Why does he act the way he does? Why do I act the way I do? Read a good novel for clues.
I found pleasure in reading this book about words, the lost and the used – how dull, one might think. But it is interesting, the making of a dictionary at a time where everything that went to the printer was hand-written – and this dictionary they slaved over , The Oxford English Dictionary, usually called the OED, was 12 volumes long. There was romance, but it wasn’t smutty or overly graphic. There were arguments and jealousies and cheating and laziness which never turned into fisticuffs, and there was a persistence at this job that could be tedious by its sameness and repetition, and people did it all day long, every week, six days. It took them 71 years to complete the OED.
