Charged with meaning

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

Ezra Pound (How To Read, 1931)

The Dictionary of Lost Words

by Pip Williams (Vintage 2020/2022)

Who write’s the dictionary? Who decides which words are included and which excluded? Whose language is it, anyway?

This wonderful novel is anchored in the real events and people who compiled the first Oxford English Dictionary. The main character, Esme, grows up and comes of age within the Scriptorium where the OED began. She begins literally at the feet of her father, one of the sub-editors, and weaves her life from the stray words that fall to the floor.

She comes of age through the sharing of women’s words in Oxford’s Covered Market, and the companionship of those striving for women’s suffrage. Esme is singularly brilliant, curious and engaging, but by degrees she is broken by events yet remains unafraid of Life, nurtured by her friend Lizzie. Unexpected motherhood, deeply ingrained sexist discrimination, love and loss as the 20th century and the Great War – these things churn her life and the lives of all around her. Nothing stays the same, yet the words on the page try to capture the meanings and moments.

As in the world outside the Scriptorium, there are smaller-scale power struggles over each nuance of meaning and each painstaking correction. Old white male conservatism excludes and alienates – especially women’s voices, women’s words. Esme’s life’s work blossoms into giving a voice to the voiceless. I wept with her.

I never wanted this book to end. Pip Williams writes with such a deft and natural touch, on a foundation of meticulous research – the methods of careful scholarship are completely authentic. She breathes life into Victorians and Edwardians without a hint of anachronism. One aspect of her craft is the way that many of the weightiest events happen off stage. We experience the build up, the expectation, the anticipation or mounting excitement, and next discover that something significant has happened through a letter to Esme from her Aunt Ditte (Edith). We never see what happened at her boarding school, or at other turning points in the story, but we hear Esme’s unsaid concerns and loves and losses through Ditte’s responses. Brilliant.

“LEXICO’GRAPHER. n. s. […] A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge

Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language, 1755

I empathise closely with fictional Esme, I relate to her love of words and meanings and have myself been on the fringes of making dictionaries. I provided material for (and proof-read corrections for) a tri-lingual Ethiopian dictionary. I worked with a translator to develop publishing software resources for languages in the Philippines and PNG. And I assisted in teaching teams the principles of dictionary-making for thirteen minority languages at a Ministry of Education workshop in Addis Ababa. I feel as proud as anything I have ever done to have been associated with putting these books into the hands of teachers and new readers who were better equipped to learn in their Mother Tongues.

The Mother Tongue is not learned from a dictionary, however. It is almost always from one’s mother first and foremost. Women are the propagators of an ever-evolving language and are the curators of words and wisdom, learning them from at very least one or two generations before and passing them onward to the one or two generations that follow. It’s an unending relay of meaning, mingled with parental love. Meanwhile, for so long it was men in their ivory towers who have held the keys to the dictionary, as of so much else. The power of words. This is why words matter, and our choice of words, pronouns, titles etc. – words that include or exclude – they matter because who gets a voice is a matter of who holds power and who is truly free. For too long I, like most privileged white men, have done too much talking and not enough listening.

Elsewhere on the bookshelf

• Silt’e-Amharic-English Dictionary by Eeva H. M. Gutt and Hussein Mohammed Mussa, publ. Addis Ababa University Press, 1997 – my hardback copy, inscribed with thanks from Eeva, is one of the books I would save from a fire.
• You Just Don’t Understand Me: Women and Men in Conversation by Deborah Tannen (1990; Virago Press 1991) – there have been many books along the lines of Women : Men :: Venus : Mars, but this is a brilliantly written study of what goes on in conversional language. Serious linguistics and insightful psychology. How I wish I had read this a couple of decades earlier…
• The Liar’s Dictionary by Eley Williams, publ. Cornerstone, 2021 – another superb novel set within the covers the fictional Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary; it is a mystery / comedy / love story that links characters a hundred years apart, communicating through mischievous made-up word definitions, or “mountweazels”.
• The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris (illustrator), publ. Hamish Hamilton, 2017 – this is book of timeless beauty, breathing life into nature words before they become lost to a generation as yet unmoved by the song of the thrush and the fall of acorns.

Mountweazel. n. s. A deliberately fictitious entry in a reference work, usually included to brand the intellectual property so copies can be identified

Adapted from the Wiktionary article for “nihilartikel”

Links

• Murray, J. A. H. – Examining the OED (ox.ac.uk) – article about the editor of the first Oxford English Dictionary
• Johnson’s Dictionary – A Harmless Drudge (bl.uk) – see the original setting of the famous quotation
• Book Aid International | Sharing the power of books – “Give a girl a chance to keep learning“; this excellent charity gives young people a chance to read for themselves. A library should not be a luxury.