NOTE: I'm taking Christmas week off, since most of us have much better things to do that week than think deep (or shallow) thoughts about libraries and information. Have a wonderful Christmas! See you next year.
REVIEW: WEIRD AND WONDERFUL WORDS
Weird and Wonderful Words, edited by Erin McKean, illustrated by Roz Chast. Oxford, 2002. 0-19-515905-5. Reviewed by Marylaine Block
Weird words, McKean says, "let you see, for as long as you care to dwell on them, some of the truly bizarre things that people have had, done, used, invented, feared, or thought" -- like stellionate, for instance, to sell the same thing to more than one person without necessarily having the right to sell it at all ("not just selling the Brooklyn Bridge," McKean notes, "but selling it twice"). Or Zopissa, a medicine made from wax and pitch scraped from the sides of ships -- a word one is downright grateful to find obsolete.
A wonderful word, on the other hand, has a sense of rightness; "it fills you with wonder. It opens vistas." Like for instance the word apocrisiary, a person appointed to give answers. If you don't wish to tell people you are a librarian because you're tired of explaining that you are not in fact paid to tell people to shush, tell them you are an apocrisiary. Gongoozler has that same sort of magic, a word for that person standing around idly staring at things.
Weird words are abundant, and so are wonderful ones, but "Finding a truly weird and wonderful word," McKean says, "is like meeting a gorgeous person who is also a good cook and will help you move." Consider Heisenbug, meaning "an error in a computer program that disappears or behaves differently when you attempt to fix or isolate it." My God, there's a WORD for it! (I'm assuming we can extend the meaning of the word to weird thing a car is doing right up until the moment you try to explain the problem to a mechanic, and again as soon as you reclaim the vehicle.)
And McKean's good humor and occasional acerbity make the travels though this linguistic landscape even more entertaining. Panmixis, she says, is "a population in which random mating takes place. Mostly applied to animals but equally well-suited to any large city or college campus." Monarsenous, she says, does not mean, as one might think, "having only one arse"; instead it means "'having only one male for several females.' Used mostly in zoological contexts, it seems apt for unbalanced dinner parties or junior-high dances."
McKean considers Macilent, a word "meaning both 'thin' (as in weight) and 'lacking in substance' (as in worth), ideal for giving ambiguous compliments."
And who of us would not enjoy having our very own sitooterie, also known as a gazebo or summerhouse, where we can sit out (oot, if you're a Scot) and enjoy the summer breeze.
The cartoon illustrations by Roz Chast are a nice addition. The iconomach, for instance, who is hostile to images, is sitting on a couch beneath the framed statement: "landscape with three trees way in the distance and some cows and horses," while the illustration of onolatry (the worship of asses) shows a man bowing before a very puzzled donkey saying, "I am not worthy."
At the end of the book McKean offers suggestions on how to create your own weird and wonderful words, including a table of sounds with letter combinations to produce them and a table of common Latin and Greek roots to draw on. She also suggests how to increase your word's chances of surviving, and even flourishing: create a word that fills a hole in the language, a word that flows trippingly off the tongue, and a spelling which makes the pronunciation obvious.
In this book, we clearly are seeing Erin McKean in her persona as editor of Verbatim: the Language Quarterly (an interesting and often amusing journal) rather than Erin McKean in her role as senior editor for the Oxford University Press North American Dictionary program, for this is much more a book for word lovers than a dictionary. Still, it will undoubtedly answer the occasional reference question as well as entertain, so while I recommend buying at least one copy for the word mavens among your users, you could treat also yourself to another one for your reference collection.
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COOL QUOTE
The search is for the just word, the happy phrase that will give expression to the thought, but somehow the thought itself is transfigured by the phrase when found.
Benjamin Cardozo. The Growth of the Law. 1924.
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Copyright, Marylaine Block, 1999-2002.
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