Book review: ‘The Dictionary of Difficult Words’ by Jane Solomon and Louise Lockhart

Early English dictionaries, such as A Table Alphabeticall (1604), did not aim to be thorough. Instead they defined only difficult and specialised vocabulary – the assumption being that ordinary, familiar words did not need explaining. There are practical benefits to learning difficult words, and they often have aesthetic and intellectual appeal too, whether they are ‘lost’ words or simply outside the everyday trade of language.

Children in particular can be delighted by weird and wonderful words. And children in particular will lap up The Dictionary of Difficult Words, a new book written by lexicographer Jane Solomon and illustrated by Louise Lockhart. It’s aimed principally at readers aged 7–12, but this is a publication that will brighten anyone’s bookshelf. It would be very much at home in school libraries too.

Before opening the book, I was struck by how attractive it is as an object. The large, slim hardback has an embossed title and beautiful texture on the cover. The design throughout is fun and expressive, with multiple drawings or collages on every page. The whole package is artfully coloured and styled, with lexical and graphic marvels galore.

Some definitions are pithy:

An Esperanto Saga

At the turn of the year I decided, finally, to start using Duolingo to learn another language. I considered brushing up on Irish, French, or German – chronic rustiness has set in for all three – or delving into Italian, Latin, or Russian. But then I took a notion to try Esperanto, and the idea stuck.

So I’m learning basic Esperanto, to build on the impromptu lesson I got from a stranger on the streets of Galway once. It’s more out of linguistic curiosity than any practical ambition; obscure William Shatner films aside, I seldom encounter the language in social or cultural context. So it was an unlikely but pleasing coincidence to come across Esperanto in a comic book.

Saga, written by Brian K. Vaughan, drawn by Fiona Staples, and published by Image Comics, is a sci-fi adventure fantasy whose first two volumes (of eight published to date) I picked up on spec last week. It won’t be to all tastes – there’s graphic sex and violence – but it’s an uncommonly imaginative, funny, and unpredictable work for fans of heady, beautifully drawn graphic novels.

The main storyline follows Alana and Marko, lovers from worlds at war with each other, one a moon of the other. Alana’s home planet, Landfall, uses a language called Language – English, in the comic – while Marko’s home moon, Wreath, uses one called Blue which is actually Esperanto.

Marko speaks Language as well, but few people (or creatures) seem to know Blue except for the moon’s natives. This asymmetry can be bypassed with technology:

[click images to enlarge]

Blue features liberally in Saga but is not translated in footnotes, so non-Esperantists must use context and educated guesswork to infer the meaning, or else patch the text into Google Translate. For the most part the sense can be grasped in situ.

For this reader, it helped that Esperanto draws on Romance languages. My knowledge of French would not have helped me much with the next line, but passive exposure to other languages did, along with the initial Duolingo training:

Dr Johnson’s House in London

On a recent trip to London I visited 17 Gough Square, better known as Dr Johnson’s House. Samuel Johnson compiled his great Dictionary of 1755 in this tall Georgian building, and I’ve always wanted to visit. As I’m currently writing a column on the subject (ish), the timing was apt.

On my way there I passed a Furnival Street and wondered if it was named after another lexicographer – but that Furnivall has two l’s in his name, so I guess not.

The house is ‘one of a very few of its age to survive in the City of London, and the only one of Johnson’s eighteen London homes to have done so’, Henry Hitchings writes in his terrific book Defining the World (aka Dr Johnson’s Dictionary). Here’s the plaque outside:

Upstairs, a stained-glass window of Johnson overlooks the square:

The Wug-Plant

‘Precious Artifact’ is a short story by Philip K. Dick that I read recently in the collection The Golden Man (Methuen, 1981). I won’t get into the story here, or the book, except to lend context to a phrase he coined for it. But if you’re averse to mild spoilers, skip ahead a little.

The phrase is introduced when the protagonist, based on Mars, is preparing to return to Earth, or Terra as it’s called in the story:

Milt Biskle said, “I want you to do something for me. I feel too tired, too—” He gestured. “Or depressed, maybe. Anyhow I’d like you to make arrangements for my gear, including my wug-plant, to be put aboard a transport returning to Terra.”

Milt’s singling out the wug-plant is significant both narratively (for reasons I’ll ignore) and emotionally: he’s attached to it to the point of calling it a pet. Later, on ‘Terra’, he finds it has not prospered in the new climate (‘my wug-plant isn’t thriving’), and soon afterwards ‘he found his Martian wug-plant dead’.

But wug-plant is most significant linguistically. Those of you with a background or interest in linguistics will know why, but for the benefit of other readers I’ll explain briefly.

Photo challenge: Dancer on the door

On the Daily Post blog, Cheri Lucas Rowlands has invited WordPress users to share photos of doors as part of a photo challenge. For a break from my usual subjects, I’m joining in with a repost from 2010, just because.

Doors, Cheri writes, can be a source of beauty in the mundane, and in this case I love how an old building with a certain mournful, dilapidated charm was briefly transformed by an anonymous street artist into something quite magical.

Andy Warhol and language

“Words troubled and failed Andy Warhol,” writes Wayne Koestenbaum on the first page of his biography of the artist (Penguin Books, 2001), even though Warhol wrote many books, “with ghostly assistance”, and had a distinctive speaking style.

Koestenbaum returns several times to Warhol’s relationship with language and with time, noting how Warhol’s love of repetition manifested in verbal expression, and remarking on how he “distrusted language” and didn’t understand “how grammar unfolded episodically in linear time, rather than in one violent atemporal explosion”.

I want to quote one passage in particular, from later in the book (which is more psychological portrait than straight biography). Warhol’s magazine Interview, first titled inter/VIEW and then Andy Warhol’s Interview, featured stars interviewing other stars with the results transcribed generously and precisely, without the editing that conventionally turns spontaneous speech into readable prose:

Interview magazine was Andy’s most sustained attempt, after a [a novel], to cross the border between tape-recorded speech and the written word: his experiments in bridging this divide involve a serious philosophical quest to figure out where and how verbal meaning breaks down, and to track the imprecise, shiftless way the words occupy the time it takes to utter and understand them. Andy’s intensest experiences were visual, not verbal, yet he remained fascinated by his own difficult, hampered process of verbalization. Interview, an ideal vehicle, allowed him to indulge his interest in dialogue, as well as his desire to bodysnatch reality and to seal it in falsely labeled canisters. Via the technological mediation of tape recorder, Andy hoodwinked time and talk, and canned it as a product bearing his own name.

I don’t know how serious a philosophical quest it was, but I can relate to the interest in unedited dialogue. Anyone who has transcribed recorded speech will have noticed how halting and erratic is its syntax, compared to the deliberate (if not always elegant) order of writing.

Speech, particularly in conversation, is characterised by false starts, broken phrasing, and disorganised ideas; full, coherent sentences are the exception. Little wonder our memory of syntax and vocabulary is so poor.

Warhol’s unashamedly commercial attitude can belie the fact that he was a deeply sensual artist, and for all his awkwardness with language I think he must have savoured this slippery, intimate side of it – especially when it manifested in so messy and profligate a fashion.

The making of a book sculpture, by Emma Taylor

You might know Emma Taylor’s book sculptures. They are lovely creations: intricate, serene, and alive. Her work is reminiscent of the anonymous book art that began appearing in Edinburgh a few years ago, but the identity of the latter remains unknown.

[NB: I initially believed the two artists were the same, and have edited the above to clarify. Sorry about that.]

Ms. Taylor has a Tumblr blog showcasing her work: From Within a Book, to which I now direct your attention. The main page has assorted photos, links, and notes, including works in progress. There’s also a selection of completed sculptures. She writes:

To me the possibility of the end of the book is a tragic one; I appreciate books as an object as much as I enjoy the stories and knowledge which they hold.

This appreciation surely grows in those exposed to her art: think how a beginning reader with their first library card would react upon seeing these miniature worlds that seem to grow out of the very pages of each book, the text embodied in a study of itself.

As a child I adored ‘make and do’, tugging and taping paper into all sorts of three-dimensional entities – all quite crude and disposable, but transporting nonetheless. Peggy Nelson, in her analysis of pop-up books, put it nicely: “we were not content with surfaces”.

Here’s a short clip showcasing Taylor’s book sculptures from 2013:

And a longer and very interesting behind-the-scenes video showing step by step how she turned a copy of John Galsworthy’s Swan Song into a ‘Swan Song’ of her own: