I am saying goodbye.
I am saying goodbye to Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, which I was required to buy when I enrolled in Jim McKelly’s ENGL 104 English Composition at Auburn University in the Fall of 1990.
Dr. McKelly worked me hard that semester, harder than anyone could have asked him to. He made me think about prose, about the sentence. And he asked me–he asked all of us–to think about particular words, which, I imagine, motivated him to require us to buy a dictionary.
This one, I imagine, was the largest one he could assign us that we could still carry. It’s a good dictionary–clear, but still finding room for the etymologies–but I’ve had better dictionaries. Now I use an American Heritage for settling mysteries relating to open and closed compounds when I’m editing a manuscript, and I turn to my Compact Oxford English Dictionary for the last word on the history of a word. Still, with the possible exception of the two-volume dictionary that came with the 1976 World Book Encyclopedia, I have used this Webster’s more than probably any dictionary I have ever touched.
Over the years the cover has foxed at the corners, the linen split from the boards, and the boards themselves have begun to open and curl. I have had to tape the boards to the spine. Some of the interior pages have been folded during the seven moves I’ve made since my freshman year at Auburn. And, during that time, I’ve slipped into the book articles about words that weren’t included, including a piece on the term steganography from the New York Times Magazine some time in the Fall of 1999 (when, interestingly, I was back in Auburn, working as an adjunct).
Now the threads are giving. The book block has split between pages 758 (miracle play ??? miscue) and 759 (miscue ??? miss).
So, I’m retiring this dictionary, placing it on the shelf between a dry-rotting copy of Poe’s collected works and a ziplocked first paperback edition of John Beecher’s To Live and Die in Dixie. My new traveling dictionary is the grandson of the Ninth–Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (Eleventh Edition), which contains the word steganography on page 1222 (steeple ??? stent).
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For the last week, I’ve been packing, choosing/not choosing the books I’ll take to Atlanta for the year, and this morning, closing the Ninth, retiring it, now I’m wondering whether I’ve packed enough books, books that share my love for the dictionary. Of course Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary should be there, with its brilliant etymological metonymies, as should Mathea Harvey’s Modern Times with its two dictionary sequences and Larissa Szporluk’s Isolato, which evidences the beauty of her interest in argot dictionaries (here, especially, words used to name the moon’s seas). But also all of Barbara Hamby’s books with their abecedarianisms and Angie Estes’ acrostic-y work.
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In accordance with Merriam-Webster’s practice, the names of cities appear in the special section of “Geographical Names” and not in the main alphabetical run of words. So, Denver is not, per se on page 334 (dentist ??? deplored) (for “Denver” see page 1532 instead), though its linguistic reach is recorded in the phrases “Denver boot,” “Denver omelet” and “Denver sandwich.”
The first two of these are deeply rooted in local parlance. It’s hard to go a day without seeing a Denver boot immobilizing a vehicle or an advertisement for the Denver omelet (which, I am told by a medallion embedded in a sidewalk was invented somewhere near the intersection of 16th and California). The dictionary tells me the term “Denver omelet” was coined in 1954, but if I want to know what it means, I have to see the entry for “western omelet,” which term, the Eleventh says, was coined in 1951, “called also Denver omelet.” “Denver boot,” I am surprised to discover, goes back to 1968; I guess Denver has long been serious about its parking tickets–however deplorable this dependent may be to the denier from whom many dollars are soon to depart.
Atlanta (page 1516) does not appear on page 78 (atilt ??? atrioventricular), and I am sad to say that while there are some interesting phrases derived from the city’s namesake (“Atlantean,” “Atlanticism”), the city does not provide for Merriam-Webster the same linguistic evidence of itself, though I think it’s a shame that the local phrase for the citizens made popular by OutKast and others–ATLien–is not here. I am writing it in, just before I turn to another namesake, the Atlas.
Here’s wishing you all happy reading in the week ahead. If you run across favorite dictionary poems, stories, essays, dictionarism or toponyms or loconyms, please share.