Consult Your Friend the Dictionary
Growing up we learned never to ask the old man the meaning of a word. I could be hard at work on English or spelling homework or perhaps reading a book a little beyond my years and I would hit a word I didn't know the meaning of and of course the natural reaction would be to look for guidance. The old man would invariably say, "Why don't you consult your friend the dictionary."
God forbid we reply, "Never mind." or, "Why cant you just tell me?" because then he would go get the two volume dictionary that was on the shelf in the living room and hover over you until he was sure that you looked up the word. Sure I learned what the word meant (if it was in that dictionary. It was a bit old) but I also developed a dislike of looking things up in a dictionary or encyclopedia that hasn't left me.
My little brother put forward the hypothesis that the reason the old man would point us towards the dictionary was because he didn't know the meaning of whatever word we were looking for elucidation on. He figure that the old man would just point us that way rather than admit he didn't know. While this may actually have been the case on occasion, I would put forward that once we piqued his curiosity with a new word he wouldn't let us just skip it because he too wanted to know the meaning and was unwilling to just try and pick it up from context. He wanted a dictionary definition.
I put forward my addition to my brother's theory because I sometimes borrow books from the old man. In any paperback book the old man owns you can open up the back cover and see a list of numbers hand written on the blank page at the end of the book. These numbers correspond to pages in the book where the old man underlined a word he didn't know the meaning of when he was reading the book and because he didn't have a dictionary handy he underlined it to come back to later.
The old man carries an electronic dictionary with him. He owns a number of them. He's been trying to find one that has not only a large number of words but large definitions. Many electronic hand held dictionaries are entirely to sparse for his purposes. They do not convey meaning clearly.
So I've taken to using the old man's notational system. While he is marking words he would like to come back to I am marking ideas I would like to contemplate further. I underline word pairs that I would like to steal to title a book rant or poem (I found a great Hemingway word pair the other day: gastric remorse) I try to mark out the point in the book where the title idea came from to try and understand why this is central in the authors mind. So far I've only done a few of my books like this and I've been sparing with the ink. In time I hope to be able to pick up any book I own and look inside the back cover to see what thoughts struck me as important on a prior reading.
Writing on a book is hard. It feels like a you are defiling something almost sacred yet it is a very old practice that people have studied. I've met with English scholars who would travel to a distant library for a chance to peruse a volume of Shakespeare that had been glossed by noted thinkers or historical figures. I could understand why they did that. They wanted to see what another person got out of the work, not just what the author intended.
That is part of why I think comments are so important to a blog. Comments serve as the gloss of societal observations. My (our)thoughts wouldn't be complete left by themselves.
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God forbid we reply, "Never mind." or, "Why cant you just tell me?" because then he would go get the two volume dictionary that was on the shelf in the living room and hover over you until he was sure that you looked up the word. Sure I learned what the word meant (if it was in that dictionary. It was a bit old) but I also developed a dislike of looking things up in a dictionary or encyclopedia that hasn't left me.
My little brother put forward the hypothesis that the reason the old man would point us towards the dictionary was because he didn't know the meaning of whatever word we were looking for elucidation on. He figure that the old man would just point us that way rather than admit he didn't know. While this may actually have been the case on occasion, I would put forward that once we piqued his curiosity with a new word he wouldn't let us just skip it because he too wanted to know the meaning and was unwilling to just try and pick it up from context. He wanted a dictionary definition.
I put forward my addition to my brother's theory because I sometimes borrow books from the old man. In any paperback book the old man owns you can open up the back cover and see a list of numbers hand written on the blank page at the end of the book. These numbers correspond to pages in the book where the old man underlined a word he didn't know the meaning of when he was reading the book and because he didn't have a dictionary handy he underlined it to come back to later.
The old man carries an electronic dictionary with him. He owns a number of them. He's been trying to find one that has not only a large number of words but large definitions. Many electronic hand held dictionaries are entirely to sparse for his purposes. They do not convey meaning clearly.
So I've taken to using the old man's notational system. While he is marking words he would like to come back to I am marking ideas I would like to contemplate further. I underline word pairs that I would like to steal to title a book rant or poem (I found a great Hemingway word pair the other day: gastric remorse) I try to mark out the point in the book where the title idea came from to try and understand why this is central in the authors mind. So far I've only done a few of my books like this and I've been sparing with the ink. In time I hope to be able to pick up any book I own and look inside the back cover to see what thoughts struck me as important on a prior reading.
Writing on a book is hard. It feels like a you are defiling something almost sacred yet it is a very old practice that people have studied. I've met with English scholars who would travel to a distant library for a chance to peruse a volume of Shakespeare that had been glossed by noted thinkers or historical figures. I could understand why they did that. They wanted to see what another person got out of the work, not just what the author intended.
That is part of why I think comments are so important to a blog. Comments serve as the gloss of societal observations. My (our)thoughts wouldn't be complete left by themselves.
More Laters
posted by Rich Rosenthal II at 4:48 AM
2 Comments:
and yet, thanks to your dad, your blog has words like "elucidation" in it. seems like he may have been on to something there.
What I want to know is when did we as a society develop this idea that a bound text is something too sacred to write upon? Or is that just one of my own idiosyncracies. I keep a pen by my bed (where I do most of my reading) but often forget to pull it out. I mark my place in the best American poetry books with a pen to remind me that I wanted to write all over the page. I really ought to wait till a second read through for that.
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