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本帖最后由 Oeasy 于 2016-5-22 11:51 编辑
节选自 The Joy of Dictionaries by Mark Forsyth Introduction to the Collins English Dictionary printed edition
Why read dictionaries?
We all, at times, read the dictionary. It is a dry and incurious soul who has never looked up an unfamiliar word, just to find its meaning, and then let their eye wander across the columns. This is the great trick, the great seduction of the dictionary. It lures you in with the promise of a quick, simple answer. But then, like a wily shopkeeper, it keeps offering you more and more. You opened the dictionary because you wanted to know what agnate meant. You are told in a quick and efficient manner that agnate means “related by descent from a common male ancestor”, but already your eye is on aglet, and you’re saying to yourself “There’s a word! A single word for the little plastic bit on the end of a shoelace”. Then it’s down to agnoiology, the philosophical theory of ignorance. And, before you know it, the day is over, it’s bedtime, and you will dream of aggressive agnathans aglimmer at Agincourt.
And even with words so familiar that you thought them boring, the etymologies surprise and delight. Nathan Bailey’s great innovation is continued in Collins. You find that a guerrilla is Spanish for a “little war”, that cappuccinos are named after Capuchin monks, or that Avalon means apple in Welsh. Sometimes these etymologies are beautifully simple. You find that a fan – as in a football fan – is simply a shortening of fanatic and you nod your head and say to yourself, that all makes perfect sense now. At other times, your jaw drops, as when you discover that avocado comes from the Aztec word for testicle, “alluding to the shape of the fruit”. It is at moments such as this that you realize you will never be able to look at a greengrocers in the same way, even though you now know that a grocer is somebody who buys his food in gross.
Each word has a story, however familiar and dull you may have thought it all your life. It’s like discovering the surprising criminal record of a work colleague. All the connections and contortions of the English language are mapped out and recorded.
And there are the strange new words, the words that you never knew, names for the unnamed. The groove that runs from your nose down to your lips, is as familiar as … well, as your own face. But to be able to call it the philtrum, to know the name is everything. Naming is power, even God knows this, which is why nobody is allowed to say the secret name of God, YHWH, aloud, and either way nobody is certain on how to pronounce it. But without any such blasphemy we can finally know that that funny backwards P used to mark paragraphs – the mysterious ¶ – is called a pilcrow. Or that the innermost rooms of a building are called the penetralia. Or that seeing shapes in the clouds is pareidolia. In fact, pareidolia involves seeing a pattern anywhere where there isn’t one, whether it’s thinking that the windows and door of a house look like the eyes and mouth of a human face, or finding significance in statistics, or secret codes in Shakespeare. All pareidolia, all nameable.
Or there’s the smell, the beautiful smell, that rises from the earth when it rains after a long dry spell. It’s a scent of summer, of refreshing rains, and there is a word for it among the new additions in this edition. It is petrichor. So now you know.
And all those are only in the Ps. Yet these words can be found throughout the dictionary, from abecedarian (arranged in alphabetical order) through to zugzwang (a situation in which anything you do will make matters worse).
Each reading of the dictionary is different. Each time you start in a new place on a new word that you just wanted to know the meaning of, and each time your eye moves in a different direction through all the myriad possibilities. W.H. Auden once said:
For a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a dictionary is absolutely passive and may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways.
A novel or a poem must be read only one way: from beginning to end. You are marched in at chapter one and then sternly guided through to the last line. But the dictionary has no beginning and no end. You can read it in any way you wish. You can read it for edification or for amusement. You can have great fun just by looking at the headwords on each page: empiric to emu, Jeevesian to jeopardy, filth to finance. Sometimes the pairings seem ridiculous, sometimes appropriate – as with bandito to bank – and sometimes frighteningly controversial – genesis to genizah, a place to dispose of worn-out biblical texts. And sometimes … well sometimes the alphabet deals you ballocks to balsam, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Only in the infinitely variable dictionary can all these possibilities be found. Begin anywhere, end anywhere, and take any journey between.
Auden wasn’t the only poet who read dictionaries. Emily Dickinson wrote in her letters that for years her dictionary was her “only companion”. In long solitary studies she riffled through her lexicon taking words in, rearranging them, and turning them out again as beautiful, perfect poems. Words in: words out. Every book ever written is merely a partial rearrangement of this one. As Jean Cocteau put it, “The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.” Here are all the possibilities and all the pleasures of language set out on paper, although perhaps the American comedian Steven Wright put it best: “I was reading the dictionary, I thought it was a poem about everything.”
Mark Forsyth is the bestselling author of The Etymologicon, The Horologicon, and The Elements of Eloquence.
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发表于 2016-5-22 11:49:59
