Excerpt from Dictionary Days

from Sleeping with My OED
by Ilan Stavans

Approximately a decade ago, with savings I had put aside for some time, I finally bought myself the two-volume set of The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. The title says it is compact but don’t be fooled: altogether the lexicon has a total of 4,116 pages and weighs some 20 pounds. Its size is equally daunting: my old wooden ruler states that it is 9 1/2 by 12 1/2 inches—surely not the type of compactness that makes it fit into your pocket. It won’t even fit in a portfolio. Actually, I don’t recommend carrying it around too much. It might break your back.

I always thought the word compact meant to abbreviate, to reduce in size, to make something manageable. But that is my own definition. The OED defines it as “to plan by compact, conspire.” So what does it mean by Compact Edition? Maybe that the Oxford dons have conspired to make the voluminous research that went into the original edition less rowdy, more agreeable.

In any case, the two handsome volumes (A to O and P to Z) came to me stored in a blue box with a drawer on top that contains a magnifying glass. The title page states that this is the complete text of the 1971 edition and that it has been reproduced micrographically, which means that a single one of the sheets I have with me reproduces a total of four pages of the original ten-volume set of the dictionary, plus the supplement, corrigenda, and lists of spurious words and books quoted.

Known by its acronym, OED, this is my Bible. And not only mine but of 600 million English-speaking people worldwide. There are, I hasten to add, newer editions: the second edition of 1989, for instance, features 20 volumes and defines 615,100 words. These definitions include 2,436,600 quotations. The total number of words used is 59,000,000, displayed in 22,730 pages. The weight is almost 140 pounds. Needless to say, there is nothing compact about it.

There is also an online edition, immediately available—and abusable—in our rushed and jumpy age. That might be the most compact of all versions, for what is less burdensome and more elastic than the Internet?

But I care for immediacy only to a degree. Is there anything better than the feeling of an actual book in your hand, especially if it is a dictionary, and even more so if it is the OED? To me, the pleasures of perusing its traditional format—its solid covers opening up like sanctuary doors, its delicate, almost translucent pages softening up to tactile choreography—are infinite.

This is how the OED describes dictionary:

a book dealing with the individual words of a language (or certain specified classes of them), so as to set forth their orthography, pronunciation, significance, and use, their synonyms, derivation, and history, or at least some of the facts: for convenience of reference, the words are arranged in some stated order, now, in most languages, alphabetical; and in larger dictionaries the information given is illustrated by quotations from literature; a word-book, vocabulary, or lexicon.

Yes, the dictionary individualizes words, taking them out of context. In the “real” world, though, words behave chaotically. They pile themselves on top of each other. They defy their users in exhaustible ways. So the dictionary does us a service: however deceitful the effort may prove to be, it attempts to bring order to chaos.

It also does something else: it tries to define everything. The OED in particular prides itself in having not left anything out. Samuel Johnson, the self-described harmless drudge, once said: “No dictionary of a living tongue can ever be perfect, since while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding, and some falling away; that a whole life cannot be spent upon syntax and etymology, and that even a whole life would not be sufficient; that he, whose design includes whatever language can express, must often speak of what he does not understand.”

Johnson was an encyclopedic thinker—in today’s parlance, a Renaissance man—but he also understood his own shortcomings. He knew well that no lexicon is able to grasp the universe entire. The makers of the OED past present and future are far more presumptuous. I’m sure they would agree with Johnson: no human effort is ever complete. They don’t say so, though. Furthermore, they hide their imperfections as best they can. Now that’s genius!

Still, what I like about the OED is precisely its attempt to defy G-d by encapsulating everything in two compact volumes—and doing so by means of exactness. That, in act, is its best asset: the OED always cuts to the basics.

I’m a skeptic, too, a citizen of today’s world like anyone else, and, as such, an unredeemed relativist. I know that exact is inexact, at least in this case. Exact is a synonym of accurate, but words always like to mutate. What the first Elizabethans understood as gay (“full of or disposed to joy and mirth”) is quite different from the definition by our contemporaries, the second Elizabethans (“a male with homosexual inclinations”). Or take the word ethnic: to my chagrin, the 1971 edition absurdly defines it thus: “pertaining to nations not Christian or Jewish.” It then adds: “Gentile, heathen, pagan.” Since I arrived in the United States, I’m seen as ethnic, although (or precisely because) I’m Jewish. That is because the word today has a different meaning. So here it goes again, ethnic: “of or relating to a population subgroup (within a larger or dominant national or cultural group) with a common national or cultural tradition.”

Anyhow, this explains why no dictionary ever compiled is absolute. It always reflects the parlance of its age and then perishes like the Sphinx tempted by fire: its knowledge becomes inexact; some words stay solid while others evaporate.

Who would I be without my OED? Sometimes at around 11:30 p.m., having finished the portions I had earlier left unread of the New York Times, I take my lexicon and browse, browse, browse. And then, rhythmically, I fall asleep with it. I envision words dancing around me. They jump out of the page, letting loose in space, intermingling with one another, making pirouettes, playing hide and seek, the letters contracting and expanding in a systole-and-diastole syncopation. Yes, words live outside our minds. They have their own private lives, filled with keenness, fervor, joy, sadness, and remorse.

I did recommend not carrying it around too much. But I confess to doing so, day in and day out. The two volumes are seldom in their box. They might find themselves in my home office, in the bedroom, the living room, the kitchen, at times even in the porch and garden. I honestly cannot think of a book I use more often.

Its best place is near my desk. But when I lie down in bed to read, I place one of the volumes on my chest and immediately complain: too heavy!

But no sooner does the pain subside than I benefit from one discovery after another. Take the word antipodes: “those who dwell directly opposite to each other on the globe, so that the soles of their feet are as it were planted against each other.” The definition insinuates the existence of a parallel universe to ours, a Leibnitzian reality in which the movement goes in the opposite direction from the one we’re used to: up is down, east is west, light is darkness, etc. First you answer the phone and then it rings. Or else, it rains from the earth to the sky. And people are born old and grow young until they become babies. I would give my kingdom to find an antipode and chat, chat, chat.

Or take oblat: “a Souldier, who, grown impotent or maimed in Service, hath maintenance or the benefit of a Monks place assigned to him in an Abbey.” Okay, so this is a happy-go-lucky veteran. But to me an oblat resembles a chimera invented by Kafka, the long-lost winged rhinoceros once possessed by the Mughomami tribe in the eastern Amazon Jungle, with a capacity to recite verbatim lost segments of the twelfth-century mystical treatise Zohar.

What if any one of us memorized all the words in the OED? It is improbable. But what if someone did? The entire memory of humankind—or at least the memory of English-speaking humankind—would be at his disposal.

In his 1967 novel Fahrenheit 451—the temperature at which books burn—Ray Bradbury imagines a dystopian society in which books are forbidden. His sources of inspiration are manifold. Emperor Shih Huang Ti, responsible for building the Chinese Wall, ordered the burning of all books in the kingdom. Tomás de Torquemada, Grand Inquisitor of the Holy Office in Spain (and a converso), also ordered the destruction of books. The list of dictators, old and new, following a similar pattern of devastation, is too long to mention. (Plus, the ignominy these tyrants deserve should include anonymity. In return for the favor, their names should be erased from memory.) But I wonder: Did any of these tyrants ever order the destruction of lexicons?

Even if they did, the memory would live on. Diderot once said: “On ne tue pas de coups de fusil aux idées.” One might kill people but one cannot kill ideas. Lexicons are a record of our ideas as we catalogue them in the form of words.