Nov 11 2008
Reading the Dictionary
Okay, I just couldn’t help it, after my last post, about Winchester’s The Meaning of Everything. I decided that today I had to bring you along on a little journey through the Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary I bought in the 70s. This was my first very-own dictionary, and it gives etymologies, which even a lot of big desk dictionaries don’t do so much these days.
But in such a way did the looking-up of one word lead toward others, and others:
“book” - from Old English boc, “beech,” prob. from the early Germanic practice of carving runic characters on beech wood tablets [way cool!] - more at BEECH
“beech” - Middle English beche, akin to Old English boc, Old High German buohha, Latin fagus, Greek phegos, “oak” [And how would “beech” be related to “fagus”? Well, I know from other language studies that “f” sometimes mutates over time into “b” or “p.” But looking at “fagus” makes me thing the word “fagot” must be related. And so…]
“fagot” - Middle English fagot [wow, there’s a stretch], from Middle French - BUNDLE, as a bundle of sticks
“bundle” - Middle English bundel, akin to Old English byndel, “bundle,” and bindan, “to bind”
“bind” - From Old English bindan, akin to Greek peisma, “cable”
“cable” - From Medieval Latin capulum, “lasso,” from Latin capere, “to take” - more at HEAVE
“heave” - Middle English heven, from Old English hebban, akin to Old High German hevan, “to lift”
As I read the dictionary in the library, or maybe at my desk, by this point, I might be thinking to myself, “Wait a minute, wasn’t I looking up ‘book’? How did I get here??”
How, indeed? By following a fascinating trail of one word to another to another. So I start at “book” and end up at “heave.” And who knows where I’d end up if I kept on reading?
Actually, as I was flipping backwards from “fagot” to “bundle,” I went too far, and happened to notice bayonet…
Are you sure you’re not my long-lost sister or something?
Heh. I used to read the dictionary also.
See? I knew I wasn’t alone in all this! I sometimes found/find the dictionary more fascinating than a novel.
It was, after all, in that old Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary that I discovered that “tavern” and “tabernacle” came from the same root — which made me laugh and laugh and laugh, thinking of my fundamentalist relatives’ disapproval of places like taverns.
I know what you mean about the Indo-European language chart. That may be where I got my own interest, too. And yesterday, going through the dictionary for this post, I had to firmly prevent myself from stopping at that alphabet chart showing the possible evolution of letters of the alphabet through time, and through different languages. (And of course, I can’t find the chart today. Ha! I should have stopped at it yesterday!!)
Reading the dictionary, what a great way to while away a few minutes, er hours, er…
Pause in the middle of writing a paper to look up a word, which leads to another word, and another, and another, and…..next thing you know that paper wasn’t written, but you gained a lot of insight into a lot of words you never expected.
The dictionary, the crack of the book world.
“It was, after all, in that old Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary that I discovered that “tavern” and “tabernacle” came from the same root”
It makes sense, when you consider what a tabernacle IS: during the harvest, you wouldn’t want to waste time going back and forth to home to eat, so they’d make a booth or hut of branches and do the cooking and eating right on site. Sort of like a picnic tent or one of the places where you pick up hot dogs and funnel cake at the county fair. The religious sense of a tabernacle came much later, after there was no longer a practical need for it, and the original meaning of the word was lost. There’s a storefront church near where I live that calls itself a Tabernacle, and I wonder if they really know what a tabernacle is.