Lost Words

LOST WORDS – BONDMAID

Ramblings for the end of the week. No more than ramblings for that’s all I can do this week.

Since the book I’m reading is The Dictionary of Lost Words, I decided I should look up rambling, although it isn’t one of the lost words.

Rambling. Lengthy or inconsequential. (Typical of Trump I add)

This is a novel about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary… and more.

Set around 1900 to begin with, a little girl whose father works on  the dictionary discovers that not all words are included.

The first of what she then calls lost words is

bondmaid.

Defined as : A slave girl, a bonded servant, someone who is bound to serve till death.

It is not a word I am familiar with. Nor is it a world I am familiar with.

Neither of the worlds, the ancient Roman, or that where servants can be bonded, is familiar to me.  Still the word must once have been used, for it was invented.

After all what is a dictionary for. The Dictionary of Lost Words is a novel. It tells you how things were done before computers and before even typewriters. It tells you of a world long gone (but perhaps alas returning), with suffragettes and young men lost to senseless wars.

There’s another relevant book, The Professor and the Madman, that is more factual and corroborates the efforts required in the making of a dictionary and what would have been involved in putting any book into print, in letting others read what has been written. I can visualize what it must have been like then when the first Oxford English Dictionary was being drawn up. Every word to be thoroughly investigated. When did it first appear? Who used it and what quotes have come down to the present day? Has it changed in meaning? Or spelling? Slips and slips of paper laboriously collated and edited and eventually turned over to a typesetter. Who gives substance to the word. A word that then becomes part of an accepted vocabulary.

Perhaps one can say it all started with Gutenberg.

The lexicographer – I see him sitting on his tit of a white desk (would have been brown though) nourished by the constant flow of words he then channeled into his definitions, which became ennobled, given substance, as they found their way to the printed page, to paper. Would tit have been included? I think so, but not surely in the same sense.

And then I think of how things have changed. Today it all goes on the computer, can be automatically saved in all its variants.

Yet there is the everlasting problem of changes to our language. Not simply the idea of lost words. In 1900 a word had to be an acceptable word. Lexicographers, like Dr. Murray, the primary editor of the Oxford Dictionary, was unswerving in his judgement of what words were suitable for inclusion. A large part of our language today is slang, invented by teenagers, incomprehensible to adults and Dr. Murray would have said that many were not words at all. Many would not have been acceptable, would, in the early 1900s, have been words heard only in uncultured conversation. Workplaces, markets, pubs. And as such would not have been considered worthy of being part of a scholarly dictionary.   Or limited to dialects, reflecting the provenience of the user.  And, therefore, not really words for they had not been given shape, substantiated, in written form. Then there are acronyms, incomprehensible to me.  Investigation, explanations, interpretations – we can find so much in the writings of the linguist John McWhorter and I delight in perusing his articles.

So-called dirty words. Obscenities.  What is acceptable and unacceptable in polite language depends so much on the ambience, on when they were used. By the time we get to Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, words that would have been taboo in polite society, initially thought of as scandalous, began to be accepted as part of life. Seems to me that now anything goes.

Words continue, and will always be part of our lives. Not only as communication, but as playthings, as necessary tools.  We can point, we can mimic, but words are much more precise. They say things only  they can “for which no indications would suffice.” Sometimes at the dinner table with my children we have amused ourselves by tracing the sources of a word and its meanings, particularly since both had a background of a classical lyceum. How many students will have that nowadays? Will words, not simply as elements of communication, continue to be part of our lives? True, I am old school and find modern parlance incomprehensible and a world of its own.

And I continue to read. And I am grateful for the many books that are part of my life. For the words, for the ideas that have come down to me in words through the centuries. For being allowed to know other ways of thought, other emotions.