“DICTIONARY,” as Ambrose Bierce defines it, with satirical acumen, is “a malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.” He adds, however, that this particular one, referring to his own book The Devil’s Dictionary, “is a most useful work.”
Dictionaries, indeed, dream of being useful. That is, they seek to be orderly, practical, and expedient. Not all succeed, of course. As with anything else, there are dictionaries that are good, meaning they are precise and imaginative, and others that are plain bad because of their rigidity. Most are both: good and bad. How often do we come across a definition that seems inspired, as if the lexicographers had hit the nail on the head? Or, contrariwise, one that feels bad, as if it had missed an opportunity, producing an explanation that is hard and inelastic and just wrong?
At any rate, Bierce is correct that dictionaries “cramp the growth of a language,” for by cataloging words, as they do, these instruments of language are inevitably aligned with tradition, suffusing words that are included in their pages with the stink of officialness and words that are left out with a spontaneity and freedom that is alluring.
This is a collection of twenty-two conversations – decidedly not interviews – about the endurance of dictionaries across time and space. The participants are dictionary makers, lexicographers, language scholars, newspaper columnists, bloggers, and other such authorities. They inhabit or come from different languages, at times more than one, which is the point since my overall interest in this endeavor is to understand how different dictionaries “behave” differently depending on the language they represent and how that language defines them.
Samuel Johnson, a renaissance man for whom I have enormous admiration, once portrayed lexicographers as “unhappy mortals who toil at the lower employments of life.” It is an unkind portrayal, made even more obnoxious as Johnson augments that these individuals are considered by humankind “not as the pupil, but the slave of science, the pionier of literature, doomed only to remove rubbish and clear obstructions in our parlance.” Truth is, the participants in the volume are quite the opposite: eloquent, passionate people interested in how 1,001 complexities of our world might be conveyed in words and vice versa.
Shakespeare, in Hamlet (Act 2, Scene 2), has his protagonist state that “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Words too might be considered neutral until the moment we use them. Once we do, they are no longer innocent. In this volume, that use – and abuse – the way different national histories catalog words in their own way, is scrutinized in an informed, enlightening fashion. Just as no two languages are alike, nor are the lexicons.
I have known many of the participants in this book for years, in some cases decades. We have become friends. I met others after sending them an admiring letter inviting them to talk to me extemporaneously about dictionaries in their life. It might look like not only my selection of speakers but that of the languages here are completely arbitrary. No doubt unadulterated affinity brought us together. What cannot be described as arbitrary is the way these languages have shaped me: I either know them intimately or I have spent extended periods in milieus where those languages are used. In other words, these are the languages that have made me who I am.
In aggregate, the exchanges were made over a period of twelve months. A few were in person, with an iPhone recording the dialogue; others were carried out via Zoom, followed by a transcription; but the vast majority came about from intense email exchanges that ultimately coalesced into a free-flowing tête-à-tête.
Every conversation starts with a headnote offering context and mapping out the exchange. In those headnotes, I occasionally express my debt to an author or book who served me as a bridge to that language, say Dante for Italian or Goethe for German. To me, this confirms Johnson’s statement that lexicographers are the pioneers of literature. Depending on the occasion, the exchanges were carried out in English, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Yiddish, and other languages. They were then translated into English, either by myself or by a trustworthy colleague, whose name is credited in the headnote. Every participant was sent various drafts of the exchange and approved the final version. Once everything was in place, they provided a list of suggested readings in the hope of inspiring readers to further explorations. The order the conversations follow is also random.
Had I had more time (we never do!), or more lives (ah, impostorship!), I would have made a dozen more of these. Or twice that amount. Or a thousand. I’m not being facetious, such has been the joy resulting from these encounters. Actually, I have always regretted the fact that, as a tool of knowledge, the dialogue, Socrates and Plato notwithstanding, is looked down upon in academia, for it is through unrehearsed conversations when information becomes knowledge. On this point, it is worth returning to Bierce. In The Devil’s Dictionary, he defines ERUDITION as “dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.” These one-on-ones prove him wrong.
The epilogue is the twenty-second conversation, although it is somewhat different. This one is a fictionalized narrative based on real-life events.
I want to thank all and every one of the participants in Conversations on Dictionaries for their energy, disposition, and generosity. I played out a number of ideas with my extraordinary students at Amherst College and with the equally inspiring campers, middle- and high-schoolers, at Great Books Summer Program. Along the way, I have received invaluable support from two student interns: Gabriel Mandereau and Ilya Nemirovsky. I also – and most emphatically – wish to express my profuse gracias to Helen Barton, my unwavering in-house editor at Cambridge University Press, who supported the idea from the start, and to her assistant Isabel Collins, who helped bring it to fruition.
Words are never only words; they conjure universes, which brings to mind Anatole France’s inspiring image of the dictionary and grants the subtitle to the volume: “l’univers dans un livre.”
