When we were in sixth and seventh grade we were an unruly lot. We waged psychological warfare, a kind of teacher vs. student battle of wits, with the nunnery at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Elementary. And though our wits were dim and their wits were heavenly, we were almost every day victorious, sending the older nuns into fits of red-faced rage and reducing the younger ones to tearful basket cases in hooded black capes. We were in fact sinners on the highway to hell, shameful little heathens we were called, deserving of God’s full wrath according to scripture. More often than not, that wrath came in the form of a dictionary.
There was many a day when our deviant behavior resulted in staying after school and writing on the green, football-field-size blackboard, “I shall stop being a little prick” until the little chalky letters filled the entire surface with barely-legible cursive. When we were done, we would then be told to erase it all, clean the blackboard and clap the erasers until we generated a dust cloud that could be seen from space. Sometimes the punishment would end there, but on most days the disciples of Christ with the black wool skirts and the groovy beaded rosary belts would assign a task that would go something like this: “Take home a dictionary from the back of the classroom and find 150 words that are exactly fourteen letters in length and DO NOT contain the letters A, L or W … These words will be neatly printed on lined paper, numbered from 1 to 150 and shall be turned in when you arrive at class tomorrow morning.”
And so it was that an angry little lad in salt-and-pepper cords came to know the place where all of the words lived.
These dictionaries that the nuns whipped us with each weighed thirty-one pounds. The type was the size of a grain of sand, the same size as the legal lines that lawyers draw up in contracts. If you didn’t turn the assignment in as instructed, then the next night you were assigned a similar task, but this time with 200 words, plus you had to transcribe the definition of each word.
The first dictionaries are generally considered to have appeared in the early 17th century, but what many people consider the gold standard, the Oxford English Dictionary was not published until 1928. It took seventy years to complete (1857–1928) and consisted of 15,490 pages of single-spaced printed text, 414,825 words, 1,827,306 illustrative quotations and 227,779,589 letters and numbers. Now there’s a task.
The way they did it, literally, was that they had a couple of guys read every single existing printed document, literature, maps, journals, papers, books, etc. When they found a passage that seemed to related to how a word was defined, they wrote it down on a little piece of scrap paper. At the end, they had over five million little scraps … and now the real work began. There was a rule that no word used in a “definition” could be more complicated than the word that was being defined. The letter with the most words in the first Oxford English Dictionary is “S” followed by “C.” “X” has the fewest words and the word “set” is the most complex word (its various meanings and usages take up the most space) in the entire dictionary.
I’ve found that the search for words is a tough task to break. Words are like Legos, they can be arranged in any fashion and can be used to construct something complex and technical or something completely imaginary. That both Legos and words are used on a whim means that they are blocks of possibilities.
It’s probably a true point that if, in the course of writing, you need to consult a dictionary for either spelling or definition, you should probably consider another word (you know, don’t use a twenty-five-cent word when a perfectly good word can be found for a nickel). But I don’t consider the dictionary a thing that holds obscure words and concepts, I think of it as a co-worker that is on standby to give me counsel, advice and assurance. We have good days and bad days together, sometimes I accuse my co-worker of not be as helpful as he could be and some days he accuses me of just using the same words over and over again.
There are a lot more fourteen-letter words in the dictionary than you’d think. That I know this first hand is a bit of an embarrassment. I kinda regret my dark nun phase, but at least I made a connection to the place where all the words live.