~a column by Colleen O’Brien
I love a mystery. Murder mysteries are a passion with me, a little passion, an offshoot of the big passion: my real and long-lived passion is words, for they are the most mysterious of all. We make them up for our own purposes, but at the end, who uses who?
I’m not more adept in their use than most, I don’t know what most of them mean (there are, after all, a million of them in American English alone). Often, I can’t recall the one I want. But the words remain my passion.
I look up all words I don’t know, not to impress but to see what they mean. Did you know there’s a word – defenestration – can mean throwing someone out a window? Now, who came up with that one? How often is it used? (Well, in Russia, if you can believe the news, often enough to make headlines.)
I think it was my sister who read a book, a mystery, in which she came across a dozen words she never heard before: hispid, philopolemic, melopeponic, dendral, eduction, eructation, phylogenic, ratiocination, cetaphile, setacean, esculent and pelf. What a find.
Like these words, there are many that are fun to say. My favorite is Winnemucca, a town in northern Nevada. If someone asks if you can speak Nevadan, all you have to do is say, “Winnemucca!”
This passion, this endless mystery one word at a time – it all started when I was 12. I was in the library in Jefferson on a Wednesday night after catechism. A boy from that class told me that in the big dictionary on the pedestal in the reading room was the word “virgin.”
I knew the word. After all, I was a Catholic, and Mary, mother of God, was always introduced as the Virgin Mary. But hearing the word outside of church, in the public library, for heaven’s sake, and by a boy! – this was about 1955 – sent shock waves through my body. Why would Mary’s first name be in the unabridged dictionary?
But somewhere in the recesses of my prepubescent brain I suddenly knew it meant more that Mary’s moniker, and because the nuns had never told me what it meant, it had to mean something they didn’t want me to know.
So, of course I sidled into the reading room to read about “virgin” in the big book. It meant, among other things, a female who had not had sexual intercourse. Even seeing “sex” in print right next to virgin made me nervous. God would get somebody for this.
Lightning didn’t strike literally; but metaphorically, I’d been rendered, head to toe.
The whole business of virgin and its definition took me some time to sort out. Obviously, I was a virgin. I got that far with great relief, but then I wondered if this put me in the category of THE virgin? Was there a reason my catechism teachers had not explained the status of the Virgin to me? Who could I ask about this?
I wound up asking no one. But I certainly got a lot of mileage out of virgin in my diary. And more important, in my mind, my thought processes and my way of looking at things, words were altered forever. I could no longer accept anything at face value. I could take nothing for granted.
I have spent the remainder of my life looking up words, only partly for definition; but most rabidly in case I’m being fooled by familiarity, hoodwinked by content.
This seminal point in my life has colored all my life; all my threads are now hooked to this sugar bag thread, and for me it occasionally leads to something I didn’t know. It’s seldom as prurient as learning that the mother of Jesus was a virgin – hardly news: many girls are virgins, and then they are not, and then eventually they have a baby. The mystery of words is such a passion with me that the pure and seemingly safe intellectual practice of looking them up is wrapped in emotion, in intuition, in the sensuous sound of the words themselves.
A compelling aspect of my passion is that with each new word, I find I am for a moment once again a virgin. A word virgin, you know.
