word-hoard

(pic by Ilene Meyer)

So they may have found Shakespeare's own dictionary. I know he used a lot of words, & even though the English language was probably at its peak then, there's a list of over 1700 words he either coined or was the first recorded user of. This set me to thinking how in writing classes nowadays, they tend to discourage writing with words the average reader might not know. They're going to just skip over them, we're told. I myself have always been willing to look words up, & in fact habitually try to use any new word the next chance i get. I learned whole pages of new words when i read Proust & Pynchon, for example; among poets probably Hart Crane or Auden most (with a special nod to Loy).

While neologizing has split off into a genre & a subculture of its own (one step removed from conlangs), & advertizers vie with scifi writers to see who can disrupt standard English vocabulary more, the poets have mostly not kept up. Two contemporary poets who have are Lissa Wolsak & Kristin Ryling; while Australian phenomenon Javant Biarujia spans the gamut from langue close to macaronics with a special emphasis on Joycean puns.

How many words does a writer need? Besides an unknown number of haphazardly assembled foreign-language dictionaries, from Albanian to Maori, I have as my main resource two unabridged dictionaries, Webster's Second (1934) & Webster's Third (1961), because each has words not found in the other. I've always wanted one of the multi-volume, regularsize-print OEDs--but have never had the money when i ever ran across one (e.g. $1000). The trouble with the latter, however, is its infusion of monkey randomness: it seems like every variant spelling of the centuries between, say, Chaucer & Johnson, has bloated the number of entries to the point where, as in Finnegans Wake, the distinction between word & not-a-word has vanished completely.

When the Internet spawned Google, nobody was gunning for encyclopedias & dictionaries; they just lost out in the info-melee that followed. So if you want to know about a word now, you maybe get an equal number of right answers & wrong answers, with only your reader's intuition to choose between them. Pre-Johnson days, again; & poignant that our store should hap upon a pricey replica of Noah's very own, 1828-vintage, just at this hour (i imagine a sect of dictionary-fundamentalists who hold this as their holy book, & refer to none besides). "But 'spite of thy hap, Hap hath well happed" (Wyatt). The Primordial Soup beckons.

in response to a diagram about different levels of abstract knowledge

what we can map are our ideas about knowledge, not knowledge itself. and our ideas are hierarchical. i remember when i was a kid i wanted to map part of a local park that had a creek running through it. after i had drawn it roughly all over, i kept going back & refining the shapes i drew, ever more closely to the shapes i could perceive. but i got to a point where i realized i could only continue the process on another piece of paper & a smaller scale... but what was i doing really? generating a certain line out of a three dimensional edge. following a cycle of look-judge-record, over & over. was my first map, or a master-map on the largest possible scale, more real than one of the small maps? was it somehow above them? was it necessarily a good thing that i could talk as if i had been over much of that space, when i had actually only traversed a small, narrow portion of it? --and was this knowledge of the park, or was it knowledge of myself in a measuring mood? it was the product of a dance between them. when the dance ended, i carried beyond it a sense of familiarity, perhaps enough to remember it later. what we like to call knowledge is mostly a very complicated set of interlocking topics: because what we want above all, is to be able to keep on talking about things as if we knew them, could know them & keep them by making maps of them. i think it is because we know deep down we will lose them, & that our very selves are nothing but another kind of map, drawn upon a momentary portion of the melting & solidifying earth.