Wordcatcher (2 page)

The Korean Brush

In Eric Partridge’s book
The Gentle Art of Lexicography,
there is a story about an elder lady who, on borrowing a dictionary from her municipal library, returned it with the comment, “A very unusual book indeed—but the stories are extremely short, aren’t they?”

—Henry Hitchings,
Johnson’s Dictionary

I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of the earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.

—Dr. Samuel Johnson, preface to the
Dictionary

You know well that, for a thousand years, the form of speech has changed, and words that then had certain meanings now seem wondrously foolish and odd to us. And yet people really spoke like that, and they succeeded as well in love as men do now.

—Geoffrey Chaucer,
Troilus and Criseyde
, 1372

n. 1594.
Act of acknowledging influences
;
a token of due recognition or appreciation
;
a favorable notice; an expression of thanks.
Its roots reach back to the Medieval English
aknow
, from the Old English
oncnawan
, to understand, recognize, know, and the old verb
knowlechen
, to admit, especially the truth.

 

If asked how long this book took to write I would have to say it’s been in the works all my life, so my first acknowledgment goes to my parents, Stanley and Rosemary Cousineau, who imbued in me the discipline of consulting
dictionaries
¹
and
encyclopedias
whenever I had trouble with my boyhood studies. For better or worse, I’ve been in thrall to words ever since. While still in my teens I was blessed with an offer to work at my hometown newspaper, the
Wayne Dispatch
, where I’d appear every Thursday night to “put the paper to bed,” and it’s to Roger
Turner, my first newspaper editor, I’d like to offer a token of recognition for that blazing red pencil that sent me scurrying to the dictionary. A nod of deep appreciation is also in order to the late Judy Serrin, my journalism teacher at the University of Detroit. Writing this book revived a dormant memory of how she began the first class each year with two simple questions: “Who reads the Op-Ed pages?” “Who reads the dictionary?” After seeing all the blank stares, she would ask, “How else are you going to learn to think for yourself ?”

As sure as heliotropic plants turn to the sun for light, so does the
logotropic
soul turn to words for illumination. In that light I would like to acknowledge with a raft of favorable notices my early
lorefathers
, the mentors who reminded me of the love of learning, the
animateurs
, Joseph Campbell, Huston Smith, and Robert A. Johnson, all of whom contributed words to my vocabulary, such as
metaphor, cornucopia,
and
numinous
. I would also like to
broadcast
my thanks to Ernie Harwell, the Detroit Tigers Hall of Fame broadcaster, who illuminated for me the origins of
boondocks
,
a word I learned from his home run calls on WJR, the sound of the Motor City. Thanks to Jeanne and Michael Adams for their offer of the use of Ansel’s cabin in Yosemite, where I found the rest and respite to finish a large portion of the book, and discovered the wonderful citations for
beauty, camera
,
and
scootch
in Ansel’s well-thumbed library. Others who have shown special
fellowfeel
for this project over the years include County Clare’s own favorite son, P. J. Curtis, who helped clarify several of the euphonious entries from Ireland, such as
cant
and
cahoots
, and my logodaedalus Dublin
friend Jaz Lynch, whose use of the old term
kibosh
caught my attention at McDaid’s Pub in Dublin many years and many pints ago. The versatile wordmonger R. B. Morris supplied me with the marvelous Tennessee riff on “help” and “hope” and true
companionship
over the years as we discussed the imponderabilia of language in bars from Knoxville to North Beach. To the late Frank McCourt, I want to acknowledge the
craic
we shared while we lectured together on the Silversea
Silver Shadow
. I’ll never forget how he described over lunch one day his introduction to the
beauty
of words in his first reading of Shakespeare, which he said felt like jewels in his mouth.

I would also like to extend a susurrus of thanks to the librarians at the San Francisco Public Library, the Detroit Public Library, and the New York Public Library, where I discovered much of the research for this book, as well as a round of
accolades
to the Two Kevins, the chrestomathic owners of Green Apple Books, in San Francisco, and George Whitman, at Shakespeare and Company, Paris, for years of serendipitous inspiration.

To my fellow bibliomancer Brenda Knight, I offer profuse thanks for thinking of that simple request that I look in my rolltop desk for any old manuscripts, or notebooks with book ideas, which is how this book was born. Thanks to copyeditor Mark Rhynsburger for his perspicacious help, Elena Granik for her marketing savvy, Frank Wiedemann for his elegant book design, Scott Idleman for his cover design, and to my publisher Frédérique Delacoste, who gave the green light to this project. Profuse thanks to my agent, Amy Rennert, for her graceful efforts in turning the idea into a reality and fighting for the
best possible artifact. And I would like to
enthusiastically
offer a palette of colorful thanks to Gregg Chadwick for his
gorgeous
illustrations, and even more, his doughty dedication to the cause of “the painted word,” which helps bring poets and painters together. Final acknowledgments, in the third sense of the word, understanding the truth of something, are due to my family, Jo Beaton and Jack Cousineau, who gracefully dealt with my long disappearances into my writing studio and distant libraries, as I rode my hobbyhorse of word fascination.

May all who read this book learn to love the riffling of pages in their favorite dictionaries.

Every word, without exception, is an enchantment, a wonder, a marvel, aphorisms compressed to single words, sometimes single phonemes.

—Lewis Thomas

 

Every Friday night of my boyhood my father pulled out the plug of the old Philco television and pulled down one of his favorite books from the oak bookshelves in the living room. After asking my mother to pour him his nightly shot of Jack Daniel’s, he asked her to join my younger brother and sister and me around his favorite leather reading chair. There he would lead us, one page at a time, through the classics that he loved, Homer, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, or
Tales from the Arabian Nights
.

Naturally, there were a few words in those difficult but powerful books that we kids didn’t understand. But my parents encouraged us to admit when we were stumped and to ask
questions. To this day I can recall being enchanted, as Lewis Thomas writes above, but stymied by such unusual words as
shanghaied
in
The Sea Wolf;
mentor
in
The Odyssey
;
rapscallion
in
Huckleberry Finn
;
or bohemian
in Van Gogh’s letters. Tentatively, I would ask my father, whose knowledge of words was
encyclopedic
, the meaning of the ones I didn’t understand. But rather than give me an easy answer, he would point to our hefty edition of
The Random House
Dictionary
,
whose covers were always open like the wings of a giant bird, on the ottoman next to his chair.

“Look it up, Philip,” he’d say. “That’s why I bought the
damned
thing.”

But his pedagogic tricks didn’t end there.

When I started playing baseball he gave me a subscription to the
Sporting News
. One day he noticed that I was reading Ray Bradbury so he signed me up for a science-fiction book club. Saturday mornings were dedicated to sharing breakfast together at Brownie’s, the old diner in town, where we would try to solve the crossword puzzles in the
Detroit Free Press
. If he took me to the Henry Ford Museum he couldn’t resist telling me the story behind the names of famous cars like
Mercury
, inspired by the Greek god of speed,
Maverick,
after a cattle rustler,
Dusenberg
, which gave us the word
doozy
, or
Cadillac
, after the French explorer who founded Detroit.

“Someday you’re going to thank me for this,” my dad would say.

And then there were the road trips. We must have been the only family in America to actually carry a dictionary in the car with us when we went on vacations. When we made the
pilgrimage to Edgar Allan Poe’s home, in Philadelphia, I heard our guide pronounce the sonically thrilling
tintinnabulation
—and of course had to look it up back in the car. On a visit to a Matisse exhibit in Toledo, Ohio, I read in an art catalog the French word for a quick sketch,
pochade
. When my parents drove us up to Stratford, Ontario, to see a performance of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, the word
seeksorrow
leapt out at me from the stage, and I’ve loved it ever since.

This is also how my life as a wordcatcher began. Word by word, book by book, play by play, movie by movie, road by road, café by café, pub by pub, conversation by conversation, dictionary by dictionary.

In this spirit, the words that have fascinated me most have also compelled me to follow them back as far as my dictionaries and lexicons will take me, as if I were following in the wake of my French-Canadian
voyageur
ancestors up a surging river to its distant source. This is, in every sense of the word, the very meaning of
derivation
, from
de
, from,
rivus
, stream. Originally, it referred to the act of following a current of water to its source, and eventually came to mean, as the great Dr. Johnson defined it, “the tracing of a word from its origin.”

Together, we find that to
derive
a word is to explore it, track it back to its earliest reference, story, or citation, the place from which it
flows
, a place full of immense energy, history, and mystery.

As the African proverb says, “Every river runs to its mama.”

 

When the great J. R. R. Tolkien listened to a lecture by his son Christopher, Tolkien the elder was moved to see himself and his life’s work in an entirely new light.