Friday, November 7, 2008

"Reading the OED"

Ammon Shea

A Perigree Book, $21.95

Reviewed by John French

My modest library contains a good single-volume dictionary published by the Oxford University Press. Ammon Shea's vast library also contains a dictionary published by the Oxford University Press, but that is where the similarity ends. His is the Oxford English Dictionary (the "OED"), which runs to 20 volumes, weighs 137.72 pounds, has 21,730 pages, and rambles on for 59 million words, more or less.

Further to distinguish Shea from myself, it has never occurred to me to read my single-volume dictionary from cover to cover, but Shea devoted a year of his life to reading the OED from A to Z and he loved it so much that he is reading it again. In Shea's own remarkable assessment, "the OED is a great read."

"Reading the OED" is a delightful little book (221 pages) about Shea's extraordinary, if peculiar, journey through the granddaddy of all English-language dictionaries. He offers us a short chapter for every letter of the alphabet, with each chapter identifying and discussing a few words he has encountered as well as anecdotes about how his life is going at the time.

But Shea's odyssey through the OED was not pure pleasure. It caused him to develop headaches, which he first rationalized as a sign of progress but then ameliorated through the acquisition of eyeglasses. When Shea reached the letter "I" he found he disliked it because it tasted like capers, which he took to be a sure sign that he was losing his mind.

Also, Shea encountered process problems. There were too many distractions to permit him to read at home or on park benches or even to decipher his own notes. For example, one note read "!‚Üí???•__Eutrapely - (more, + Shipley?)." He still has no idea what that means.

Eventually Shea found a reading room in the basement of Hunter College where the books are in French, which he cannot read, and where students seldom visit. When the occasional interloper blundered in, he at first responded brusquely. Then, out of embarrassment at his bad behavior, he resorted to telling them that there were rats in the basement. Not surprisingly, he was soon alone again with the OED.

Shea's whimsical musings and meanderings are delightful and so are the bizarre words he found. To me, the most ridiculous is "unbepissed," meaning "not having been urinated on." What, one wonders, was the need to coin a word for this situation? And, if "unbepissed" does not get to you, how about "peristeronic" which means "suggestive of pigeons"? Or "yepsen," meaning "the amount that can be held in two hands cupped together," which cannot possibly describe anything definite given the different sizes of hands.

But Shea gives us many words with which to per-plex our friends in polite (or impolite) conversation:

Don't be such a "cachinnator" -- a person who laughs too loud or too much.

Why must we be ruled by a "kakistocracy" -- a government by the worst citizens?

Or, why do you "obganiate" -- annoy by repeating over and over, as when your children in the backseat of the car repeatedly ask, "Are we there yet?"

Occasionally, the source of a word brings a smile, as when you learn that "mammothrept," meaning a spoiled child or infant, comes from the Greek word for a child brought up by his grandmother; or that "sarcast," meaning a writer or speaker who is sarcastic, derives from the Greek for "to tear flesh like dogs."

My favorite in this category, though, is "secretary." I have always held this word in high regard; after all, our country's chief foreign-affairs officer is the Secretary of State and its chief financial officer is the Secretary of the Treasury. But recently, in ordinary life, the term "secretary" is being replaced by the word "assistant." Too bad, because the origin of "secretary" is "one privy to a secret." Now that is a real distinction, and one not necessarily associated with an assistant.

Much of this book's charm derives from Shea's commentary on the OED definitions. "Inquilinate," meaning to dwell in a strange place, reminds Shea of the year he lived in Southern California. "Impedimenta" referring generally to things, like baggage, that impede progress, he prefers to think of when he encounters "any of the general things that slow one's progress through life, such as having a moral code of some sort."

Ironically, Shea notes with pleasure in his chapter devoted to "P" how exciting it is to find a mistake in a dictionary. This graciously allows me to reveal a mistake that I found in "Reading the OED." On page 11, Shea has occasion to refer to the "cleaner of the Aegean stables." But the Aegean is a sea; it has never had stables. The correct reference has to be to the "Augean" stables, belonging in Greek mythology to the legendary King Augeas, which were so filthy that they could not be cleaned until Hercules diverted a river through them.

Can it be that the erudite Mr. Shea actually committed such an error? Perhaps, but I prefer to think otherwise. I believe he deliberately decided to test the extent to which his readers were paying attention.

In any event, in case you have not been paying attention to anything written above, let me assure you that "Reading the OED" offers a thoroughly enjoyable reading experience. In Shea's words, "If you are interested in vocabulary that is both spectacularly useful and beautifully useless, read on and enjoy the efforts of a man who is in love with words."