“I always shy away from saying ‘that’s not a word’ or ‘that’s not in the dictionary,'” Ammon Shea told me; for that matter, he thinks it’s curious that people even talk about looking up words in the dictionary, when they really mean a dictionary, or their dictionary. He had a recent example to draw from: In last week’s NY Times Book Review, a reviewer complained about the “informal” language in a book about Silicon Valley: “The last time I checked the American Heritage Dictionary,” Katie Hafner writes, “in spite of how computer trade journalists might choose to use the word, ‘architect’ was not recognized as a verb.”
“And it’s not in the American Heritage,” Shea conceded, “but it IS in the Oxford English Dictionary.” In fact, he continues, the OED’s citations place the verb’s pedigree back to the early 19th century. Shea ought to know; he spent the better part of a year reading all twenty volumes of the dictionary cover to cover, an experience he writes about in a book called, simply enough, Reading the OED.
(Ironically, after writing out that story, I realized that Shea had already blogged about it for Oxford University Press, where he’s been writing weekly posts since March. Well, I’m not cutting my lede, that’s for sure!)
It’s a project he’d had in mind for a long time, but even though he owned hundreds of dictionaries, he didn’t buy his own OED until early 2007, when he found a set on eBay. “On the one hand, it’s crazy to spend $1000 or so on a dictionary,” he admitted (although I’ve done the same thing, only I got mine from a Brooklyn bookstore). “But if you’re at all interested in words, it will provide you with a lifetime’s worth of enjoyment not to mention education… I’ve never sat down to look something up in the OED and come away feeling stupider.”
From the beginning, Shea had the idea that reading the OED would lead to Reading the OED; for one thing, getting an advance was about the only way he could dedicate himself to the task full-time. St. Martin’s Press, for whom Shea co-authored two word guides nearly a decade ago, had right of first refusal, but he felt their offer wasn’t high enough to support the project. So the proposal went to his former editor, Marian Lizzi, who was now the editor-in-chief at Penguin Group‘s Perigee imprint, and a deal was soon struck.
One of the pleasures I took in Shea’s guided tour is the number of obsolete, discarded words that describe certain bloggers so perfectly, from anonymuncle (“an anonymous, small-time write”) and bayard (“a person armed with the self-confidence of ignorance”) to bully-scribbler (“a bullying writer”) and zoilus (“an envious critic”). Of course, I don’t focus solely on the negative; there’s also a defintion for mumpsimus, which gave new meaning to the enjoyment of one of my favorite blogs. Shea treats such words as curios, however, and often takes pleasure in how little communicative value they’ve retained over the centuries.
“I don’t particularly enjoy writers who use big words for their own sake,” Shea said. “In fact, I find them boring.” For the most part, he says, there are two simple guidelines for using a word: Would readers understand what it means? And what does to the text’s atmosphere? There are cases when the second question can trump the first; Shea cited a passage in Nabakov where the author recalls the “long-drawn Westinghousian sigh” of a train coming to a stop—readers can grasp the long-drawn sigh readily enough, but a special few will recognize that locomotive air brakes were manufactured by Westinghouse. Knowing that a word exists for some objects or phenomena, Shea added, has inspired him to pay more attention to such things, like psithurism, “the whispering of leaves moved by the wind.”
So what do you do after reading the largest dictionary in the world? In addition to his posts on the OUP blog, Shea has been gearing up for some public speaking engagements, and he’ll be a special guest star on a fall trip to Oxford, where tourists will get to see the library rooms in which the dictionary was created. (Also coming along: OED historian Simon Winchester.) He’s got an idea for “a book about books,” he said, but for now he’s not saying much about it. And he’s actually going back and rereading some of his favorite bits—especially since Oxford’s current revision process allows him to go online and see the changes that have been made to the definitions from his 1989 edition, as well as the additions and deletions. It is, he smiled, “a perfectly lovely way of spending time.”