Pleasures of the Dictionary

Radio Record, Volume III, Issue 54, 25 July 1930, Page 9

Pleasures of the Dictionary

Much Fun from Spelling and a Good Home Game

By

A. B.

Chappell

M.A.

sxx» OUNDS a little comic, doesn’t it?-"Pleasures of the Dictionary." Like "Delights of Dentistry" or "Raptures of Rheumatism" of "Frolics of Famine," eh? But the sober fact is that there are great ' possibilities of pleasure in the dictionary. Indeed, it is the very book for jaded nerves. Its stories are so short, its subjects so constantly change, its information is so cut into snippets, that it beats "The Review of Reviews" and "Titbits" all to,rags. And that is true even if some people haven’t found it out yet. ‘They should have found it out, for, the dictionary, by reason of these qualities, seems just the book for this age.

’ ¥ Come to think of it, there is a great deal of real fun in words. Some of it is none the less welcome because it is quite -unintended. Certain makers of words, like Lewis Carroll, can put quaintness deliberately into their cre ations, and even when they have littl humour in themselves they can be put together in a way bound to evoke 4 laugh. But by themselves, just as they ean be run to earth in a dictionary many of them are inherently funny. Some are amusing because of a ver: simple quality-their length. A riot oi unconscious humour runs through them A wish to hear short words, in court if not out of it, was once voiced by Mr. Justice Sim... With fine scorn of the long word, he put deadly fear into a witness with: "Please don’t say ‘indicated,’ say ‘said.’ There is no need for these long words. ‘Said’ is such a short word and ‘indicated’ such a long one. Say ‘he said,’ and tell us as briefly as possible what he-said, but do not,. please, for goodness sake, keep on giving us all those useless words." Bearing such a name, Mr, Justice Sim knew the worth of the short word. What a saving it must have meant for him-and others! Easy to say and taking almost no time at all to. write, it gave lips much ease and must have saved many pints of good black and red ink. Alas for the Featherstonehaughs and the rest of their kind! But "for goodness sake" was going a long way round, wasn’t it? Whoever coined that phrase must have had a: sense of humour. What joy is theirs-a joy never known by the profane who let slip a foul and stupid adjective at every breath, to fill up the gaps in their thought-who have, say, a good com mand of German verbs! They have at will a way of oral relief of much good service on occasion. The dalliers with points and lines and angles have a like refuge. Who has not heard of Daniel O‘Connell and the fishwife whose tongue he silenced? She heaped oath on oath upon him in her efforts to overcome his teasing raillery; but she was quelled at last. "Hypotenuse" and "parallelopipedon" dragged ber out of her depth and drowned her Billingsgate The modern chemist, too, has similar re sources, and many other of the scientific fry. ‘A- Great. Example. UT the palm can be borne, if tue) desire it, by the fond dabblers in

classic lore. As to that, take this from the journal of Dr. Adam Clarke, under the date June 27, 1811: We: proceeded to’Portadown. On the way I was told the following anecdote of the late Dr. Wilson, senior Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, who, though a very grave man himself, was very fond of quizaing and puzzling the country people who came to inquire after their friends or relations at the college. One day, seeing a man standing in the court with a letter in his hand, gaping and staring about, and not knowing where to

go, he walked gravely up to him and inquired what he wanted. The man answered, "Siz, can you tell me where I may find Mr, Delahunte?" "Yes," said the doctor: "do you see that building, before you?" "Yes." "Then erucify this quadrangle and take the diameter of the plot beyond it, enter the opening before you, and ascend the ligneous grades; then turn to your left and you will find him either peripatounting in‘his cubicle, dormitating in his lectuary, or perescopounting through his fenastra." The poor man, who understood nothing of this and remembere& not one word but the last, said: "And pray, sir, what is the fenestra?" To which the doctor replied: "It is an orifice in an edifice to admit luminous varticles." . "Oh, you," said the poor fellow, and walked off more perplexed than befor that delicious? What ‘a name for a window, to say nothing of the rest! The Humour of Length. Loxe words, comical in their length and. structure, are found in many languages, longer, some of them, than

are likely to be put to the candidates in the spelling bee; longer than that solemn example, so eloquent of the slippered, lolling, yawning creed it describes, "latitudinarianism." Its ninesyllabled enormity is beaten easily by a word of twenty-four letters in Eupolis and by one of twenty-nine letters in,Aristophanes. Turning from Greek, you will find some intentionally laughter-provoking words in Latin, as in Seneca’s superlative piled on super-

lative in "minimissimus" and "pessimissimus." Plautus has four or five consecutive lines of comic joinings of ill-assorted words. But let us get back to our Wnglish dictionaries. They hoid many words with a laugh in them. Some of these were not meant to be added to our language, yet they have stuck fast in it. Only in large collections of words will you find many of

them. There is Chancer’s "octogaxiy™ for eighth marriage, a feat surely demanding some (distinction for its daring. Butler invented a word for a battle between a dog and a_ bear, "eynarctomachy," which seems a little superfluous. Fuller, using "ayuneulize" for "to follow inthe footsteps of an. uncle," was having a poke, but the. word is still remembered. Fa Cowper made "extraforuneous" and> Carlyle "gigmanity." The first is a long word for "outdoor." Cowper wrote: "Fine weather and a variety-of* extraforaneous occupations ... make it difficult for me to find opportunities. for writing." Carlyle’s word goes back to Thurbell’s trial. A witness said-:° "IT always thought him a respectable. man." "What do you mean by. rex. spectable?" he was asked. The answet' | was: "He kept a gig." Carlyle was tickled by the word "gigman" and gaye’ it frequent duty to describe persons of poor culture but some accidental ad-" vantages; finally, with a stroke of his sardonic humour he herded many of us into "gigmanity." By the way, when looking up some of these examples, I saw "Jawbreaker" in a dictionary, and that word, appro priate at the moment, is certainly’ comic. Slang, of course, but the slang of to-day may ‘become the classic speech of to-morrow; dictionaries of slang, full as they are of humour, are usually "ery learned works.

Why Not Invent a Word? _JSIN Ga dictionhry, you will acknow= ledge the limits of your own grasp of language: but in itself a dics tionary will quaintly help you to reale ise the limits in language itself. Today I tried to find the clearest verbal description of "spiral," in the sense employed when we speak of a spiral staircase. The best was this: "A curve which winds round,a cylinder like a screw." Simple, isn’t it? Yes, deceitfully simple, for it pre-supposes mathematical knowledge of a cylinder, and for understanding of "screw" we are thrown back upon "spiral." But can you do any better with verbal definition? Try, with your hands in your pockets or behind your back, to tell your friends what a spiral staircase is. Befter-for your amusementget some friend,to try thus to tell you.

Probably you have felt the need of some word not in any dictionary. Look up "despise," and then, running over ali possible abstract endings, find’ what is thé abstract term corresponding to the act of despising. Some folk will invent on the spur of the moment, regardless of all dictionaries save the one they could amusingly make. Said one lady to another, "Now, Mrs. ’Arris. don’t you try to be ’aughty with me I won’t ’ave it! If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s ’aught!" It is not only Mrs. Malaprop who has shown this aptitude. 'There’s Mrs. Poyser, in a different way, and Sairey Gamp and Betsey Prig. I hesitate to comment on the fact that so many of these engaging linguists are ladies. Some simple words hold tuamorous suggestion. A blackberry, you know, is red when it is green; and a white blackbird-there is such a thing-con jures up almost an equal riot of entertainment. Here I would put in a plea for the pun. A thing not noted often is that very serious people have indulged in this allegedly frivolous exer-‘cise-in reality showing some intel. lectual interest in words; more or less intellectual, of course. "To cite a lady first, there is Queen » Blizabeth’s almost too well-remembered joke at the expense of Lord Burleigh and Lord Leicester. Napoleon said of Count Lobau, whose proper name was Mouton (meaning, as our word "mutton" first did, a sheep), "Mon mouton -@est un lion’ (my sheep is a lion). Ben Jonson praises Shakespeare's lines jn a seriously punning couplet :-

In each of which he seems to shake a lance. As brandished in the eyes of ignorance. Fuller, the chureh historian, was wont to make solemn play with his own name. Baxter, the divine, called Presbyters "priest-biters,’" and played some other verbal pranks with them. Tom Hood, of course, is known equally for his pathos and his punning, and ihe. prize for the best pun goes to him by general consent for this stanza--His death, which happened in his beri At forty-odd befell; They went and told the sexton. and The sexton toll’d the bell Lewis Carroll, to return for a my» ment to him, would have made a most entertaining dictionary, but there is no. need to go beyond the one we ordinarily handle. In it you will find many a word. seemingly abdve suspicion of making merry, indulging in mischievous pranks. tricking the unWary. especially the illiterate unwary. There is no lead in a lead pencil, and no soda im soda water. A penknife is no longer a penknife. Neither i erayfish. nor a starfish, nor a silverfish is a fish. A mongoose is no sort of goose. A Mussulman may be a . woman. ‘Dead reckoning’ is anything but dead reckoning: we may say "a dead shot" or "a dead line" to convey a sense of accuracy, but ‘dead reckoning" is no more than the method of finding the place of a ship without the aid of celestial observations, from a record of the courses run and the distances made on these courses, and this gives no certainty. ‘Trusting to ‘dead recokning" nearly

cost the Allies an irreparable loss at Jutland. There are many other such twilight phrases, and the dictionary entertainingly yields them to quiet perusal. To begin to take an interest in words, with the aid of a good dictionary, is

to enter a new world. a world as full of laughter as of tears: these two, as vou know, are never far apart.

Dinner Time Spelling Bee. AND now, as a last thing, let me tell you of a round game with the dictionary that is great fun. It is a spelling bee that has enlivened many a social gathering, many a meal table. You sit round and spell. Hach supplies in succession a letter of a word in his mind. No. 1 starts. No. 2, sitting, next, adds a letter; No. 3 adds another letter, and so on round the circle, round and round as the game proceeds. Bach player has at first a certain number of points in hand; say, three for a meal table group. When these are all lost that player drops out, and the others carry on until only two are left to fight out a gladiatorial finish. A point is lost by adding a letter that finishes a word, and the thing is to avoid that in order to remain in while other players are falling out. A point may be lost also in another way to be described in a moment. Let us start.

The first player thinks a moment, decidés on a word--though really in this position that is scarcely necessary. But of one thing he has to be wary: he cannot use A or I or O as a beginning. as each of these is equivalent to a finished word. Suppose, with due caution, he says L. No. 2, mindful of pitfalls. avoids 0 and says, we will suppose. I. This gives a virtually endless uumber of possible words. No. 8. also wary, takes time enough to "heck the impulse to say D or FE or > or T, and chooses N. Now the thing gets exciting. The next player, and the next beyond, are cudgelling their brains and getting apprehensive or wicked. as the case may be. No. 4-of the wicked order-

avoids such finishing letters as BE and G and T, and in a flash, with a smile, adds another N, There is a Scots word so spelt-meaning a ravine or waterfall-but no English word. No. 5, who has been already thinking hard, heaves a sigh of relief and says HB. Now No. 6 is in the toils. He thinks of "Linnean," but remembers that the rules bar proper nouns and all "capitalised" words, So, perforce, he adds the inevitable T and loses one of his precious points. No: 7 then starts another word. The fun gets fast and furious. The fact that mischievous intent, cleverly exercised, can catch somebody further round the circle adds to the zest, and the element of chance so enters that the cleverest; can be caught helpless. _ Nevertheless, skill in spelling counts -. in the long run, for those without it are more likely to be caught napping by a particular sequence of letters or to finish a word unwittingly. When the number of players is reduced . to three and at last to two there is still excitement for those who have dropped out after losing all their points. A dictionary is a necessary adjunct to this exhilarating game-as a court of appeal. A player must have in mind an accepted word, and by consent. it must be in the dictionary used for the appeals. If a player whose turn it is to add a letter doubts whether his predecessor has a real word in mind, he is entitled to challenge that player to declare it. Then only is the dictionary opened. Should the dictionary not contain the word, or the player own up that he had no real word in mind, the challenger escapes and the defaulter loses a point. On the other hand, if the dictionary contains the word declared in answer to the challenge, the challenger loses a point. In this way the game is kept on a good level and wrangling is impossible. With the observance of these few rules this sort of spelling bee combines great fun with instruction. It can do much to promote accurate spelling and a growing vocabulary. If you’ haven’t tried it, do so. You will find it worth while.