Today’s Writing Music: “It’s Every Season (Whole New Mess)” by Angel Olsen
Today’s Reading: Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor
In “The Old Dictionary” a short story by Lydia Davis, the speaker ruminates about the loving care she gives to a 120-year-old dictionary she’s using for a “particular piece of work” she is doing. “Its pages are brownish in the margins and brittle, and very large,” Davis writes, “I risk tearing them when I turn them.” Because its spine is also weak with age, she has to consider each word thoughtfully, and if it is really worth looking up. In real life Davis is both a wonderful writer of short short stories, and also a translator (I’ve been reading her version of Proust’s Swann’s Way) I imagine, reading “The Old Dictionary” that her character here may do some similar work.
In any case, she thinks about the old dictionary and how, by comparison, she treats it more lovingly than most other things in her life: including houseplants (which never last), her dog, and even her own son. She considers her impatience and even sometimes physical roughness with her son, and wonders why she would be so careful with this dictionary and not living things. There are many reasons, she realizes: unlike the plants or the dog or her son, the dictionary wants absolutely nothing from her, and also will not heal or forget as her son inevitably will. She loves her son (not the plants so much, as we’ll see later) but her love for him is a different thing.
The story makes us consider the various kinds of love we have within us, and how we draw comparisons between them. Moreover the dictionary is special to the narrator because it is a collection of words… in this case apparently a very particular collection (perhaps of rare words, or with entries including lots of extra information about language roots, etc.?). It reminds us that beyond character, beyond plot, beyond beginnings and middles and endings… we cannot do what we do without words.
And we are only ever going to be as good as the words we have at our disposal.
Don’t get me wrong—just memorizing the dictionary can’t make us great writers. But the wider our verbal reach, the wider our range of descriptive powers. The more sounds, the more meanings that we have to play with. Sometimes I’ll walk around all day with a certain word slipping along my tongue: “ameliorate” or “sesquipedalian”. Wondering, where could I use such a word? What interesting shapes it makes in the mouth. How does it look on the page?
You may be wondering if a lot of “five dollar words” are really the answer. But there are lots of great words in the dictionary that aren’t arcane or seventeen syllables long. Arguably, throwing a rarified and clunky word like “impignorate” out there when you could just say “pawn,” makes your writing less accessible and sends a reader running.
But you might also turn a reader on with an unexpected, judiciously planted word. A little linguistic surprise—a challenge to keep them on their toes. I find myself puzzling over these things, even writing whole stories just so that I can employ something like “nudiustertian” — which means, “relating to the day before yesterday”
How cool is it that we have a word for that? I hear it and I want to put it to some use.
How could this slippery monster find its way across a character’s lips? Might they read it off some odd sign, or arcane paper? A word like that may require a smartass to speak it… that’s ok! Balance her out with a streetwise guy who refers to the dregs at the bottom of his cup of coffee as the “tittynope” (it’s a real word, I swear!)
Colorful language, whether highbrow or low, excites a reader—adds to a piece’s uniqueness. So go a little word-crazy this week. Lift your writing out of the beige and into the “cosmic latte”— that’s the official name given in 2002 to a shade of beige matching the average color of the universe as sampled from the electromagnetic radiation of 200,000 galaxies by astronomers at Johns Hopkins University (my alma mater— fancy-speak for “where I went to college)”.
It’s nice to have options, is all I’m saying, and the dictionary is a physical manifestation of all the options we have.
How many exactly? Well…
According to Merriam-Webster.com, there are an estimated 1,000,000 words in the English language (give or take a quarter million!), with around 470,000 entries in both Webster’s Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary—that’s both a ton, and still less than half of what’s out there!
Depending on how you count, Science Magazine says, the average American adult has a working vocabulary of 42,000 words—a little less than a tenth of the total dictionary. (This is surely imprecise for many reasons, but the general point here is that most of us have use of only a small fraction of the words available.)
And this is all very fluid, of course. Language is always becoming obscure, language is always being made new.
The OED’s June 2021 update of 1100 new words includes things like “unmute” (as in “Unmute yourself!” on a Zoom call), “staycation” and “mask up”. The strange circumstances of this year have changed not just us, but our language as well.
They’ve also added “deadnaming” (using a birth/former name of a transgender or non-binary person without consent), and the phrase “to spit bars” as a term for rapping.
Humanity evolves and changes, swells with fresh ideas and new slang—the dictionary rushes to keep up with our constant invention.
As a writer, I find that I can pass hours just flipping around in the dictionary, finding strange words, reading alternate definitions, discovering origins and roots I never knew about before.
Often I’ll see a word with such immense potential that I want to immediately rush off and write a story where the word is either in the title or somehow central to the work.
One of the first stories I ever finished was written this way. I got a dictionary as a present and, flipping through it, I chanced upon the word “indehiscent”":
/ˌindəˈhis(ə)nt/
adjective BOTANY
(of a pod or fruit) not splitting open to release the seeds when ripe.
And boom, I was off, with a story about a young girl who, after a traumatic car accident, grapples with arrested development and a neighbor who loves gardening. It was a little on-the-nose maybe, but it came together in a way that nothing I’d done before really had because the story had a core—in that single word—that I’d never known how to find before.
Years later, I wrote a series called “Dictionary Stories”—one every two weeks, for a year, returning to this same idea, going from A (Auto-da-Fé) to Z (Zugzwang) and came out with many delightful stories in between that have also evolved into sections of novels. There’s really no end to the possibilities—or, I guess, there are at least 470,000.
To this end, I like to keep a list of new and interesting words that I come across, hoping they may be useful someday. Here are the first five from the current list of fifty (collected in the past year) that I’ll share in full in an upcoming Bonus Post.
1) Evert (v.) turn (a structure or organ) outward or inside out.
2) Lambent (adj.) (of light or fire) glowing, gleaming, or flickering with a soft radiance.
3) Folletto (plural folletti) (n.) elf (imp, goblin, fairy; esp : a supernatural being who is a survivor in popular form of an ancient Etruscan or Roman deity)
4) Planetesimal (n.) a minute planet; a body that could or did come together with many others under gravitation to form a planet.
5) Effulgent (adj.) shining brightly; radiant. (of a person or their expression) emanating joy or goodness.
These could be titles, or just jumping off points—but they each stood out to me for some reason or other. Words are pure potential energy, sitting there waiting for us to nudge them into kinetic power.
Vladimir Nabokov, one of the 20th century’s great literary geniuses, famously had a rare condition called synesthesia, which he described in his memoir Speak, Memory as generating certain colors in his mind as he heard different letters and sounds. Long ago I received a beautiful book of watercolor representations of the letters as he describes them:
I imagine this rare cross-wiring was partly connected to his drive to find and use strangely beautiful words. This article by UK writer Matthew Janney gives us a look at some of the incredible and strange English words that Nabokov used in Lolita. There’s a longer list in the article, but this paragraph delves nicely into just a few:
“Nictate”, a synonym for blink, “tessellated”, a style of square patterning and “meretricious,” the quality of appearing misleadingly attractive all appear in Lolita, demonstrating Nabokov’s unique style. As do the words “heliotropic”, the seasonal movement of plants and “rime”, a particular type of frost, that echo Nabokov’s deep connection with nature. Through Nabokov’s specificity, the reader is embedded in a more convincing, and ultimately more visceral, reality.
I used to think it was unfair that Nabokov could write so well in English, seeing that it was his third language—he also wrote in Russian and French. But at some point I realized that it is because it was his third language that he could. Not only did he possess a richer understanding of the ways words work in two other languages, but he approached the English dictionary as an outsider—giving every word in it an equal value and usage (as opposed to the way a native speaker like myself naturally learns that certain words are of more regular or common use).
Whatever the case, Nabokov’s egalitarian approach inspires me still: let’s write as if every word in the dictionary can and should be used.
And every word means every word: including the simple, regular-use ones.
There’s nothing wrong with plainspoken language, of course—but even this is hardly ever simple. If you’re going to use a more minimalist band of language, you need that language to do all that it can do. Do you want “ardor” or “zeal”? “Intensity” or “fervency”—the differences become incredibly subtle, and incredibly important. You might miss a few crazy words here or there in an onslaught by a maximalist like David Foster Wallace, but in a Mary Robison story, every single one has got to hit exactly right, or the story doesn’t work.
Le mot juste is le mot juste, no matter how simple or wild the mot happens to be.
To turn back to “The Old Dictionary” for a moment. The full piece is about 1000 words—this is actually rather long for a Lydia Davis story, whose works are sometimes just a few lines long. The language is all very simple—at one point she uses the word “manhandling” to describe her son’s treatment of her dog, but that’s the most unusual word I can find in the whole piece.
But what draws my attention more, actually, are the places where she could use a strange word but doesn’t—which itself feels unusual:
Discussing the dying houseplants, she writes: “Most of them are strange-looking rather than nice-looking. Some of them were nice-looking when I bought them but are strange-looking now because I haven’t taken very good care of them. Most of them are in pots that are the same ugly plastic pots they came in. I don’t actually like them very much. Is there any other reason to like a houseplant, if it is not nice-looking? Am I kinder to something that is nice-looking?”
The repetition of “nice-looking” and “strange-looking” stands out here. Why not “pretty” and “ugly” or “pleasing” or “unpleasing”? “Attractive” and “unattractive”? In her way she is choosing to do something a bit odd here, without saying they’re “prepossessing” and “grotesque”.
Note too, the line “most of them are in pots that are the same ugly plastic pots they came in.”
Why not just say, “Most of them are in the same ugly plastic pots they came in?”
In a messy, maximalist stream of consciousness we might miss the crudeness of this, but here, because everything else is so well-wrought, the sentence stands out.
There’s a stumble in the middle of it, as if these pots—these ugly plastic pots—are throwing her verbal powers off. Surely it’s intentional on Davis’s part.
Whether you go big with wild language and rare words, or work the hell out of the more common ones—in the end, it comes down to the same thing. Writers nurture a respect, even a reverence for words.
In her book, The Writing Life, Annie Dillard recalls a student who asks if they have what it takes to be a writer, and she responds, “I don’t know. Do you like sentences?”
Do you like sentences? Do you like words?
Kurt Vonnegut reminds us that it goes deeper than that: “A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo.”
Do you like letters?
Punctuation marks?
That’s all we have, in the end. But love them and, well, there are literally a million possibilities out there—more than enough to keep us each busy for a lifetime.
Writing Towards Fun #7:
You know where I’m going with this one… get thee to a dictionary! Grab a real one, a big heavy one, off the shelf—if you don’t have one, the library will.
Flip through it until something catches your eye.
Floccinaucinihilipilification? That’s the action or habit of estimating something as worthless.
Omnishambles? That’s a state of total disorder.
Will you “absquatulate”? That means to leave somewhere abruptly.
My advice is to make the word the title, or make up a title with the word in it: “The Omnishambles of Indigo Street” or “Absquatulation and Other Rudeness”… etc. (This may change eventually, but just do it to start going.)
You might use the word itself in the story, or you might not. Don’t force it. But keep the idea of it in mind as you write. “This is a story about a huge mess.” or “This is a story about someone who bails on a party.” Let your imagination follow from there.
And have fun!