Ode to the OED

"the good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense - which sense I propose to develop in myself and in others whenever I have the chance."

When I first read this passage from Nobokov in an English class at UT, I immediately circled, underlined, and highlighted the entire thing. I knew that it would have some profound impact on me at some point. Seven years later, I still remember that passage and eagerly sought it out to share.

Since reading that, I have always kept a dictionary nearby. And when I don’t have one, I just circle and dog-ear the hell out of the page. To me, unless they are some hard-back, signed, first edition of Survivor, locked in the glass cabinet at Half Price Books, books themselves are not sacred. As long as I can read the words and enjoy the gift that they are giving me, the books themselves are nothing but vessels. But I digress.

Memory? Sure. We all need memories. Most of what you read in my blogs are nothing but memories, jazzed up to be a little shinier than I actually recollect them. But I know some people who have the memory of an amnesia patient and can write very beautiful things. I myself have bouts of absolute emptiness in my head. Moments where a word I want to reach is playing hide and seek with me, sometimes hiding behind my left eye, other times laying low in that back part of my brain where I get tension headaches. There is only one thing that can help me when the words start teasing me so.

Imagination and artistic sense? Of course. How can you expect to create anything without those two? Well, I guess you could create a baby. That’s pretty primal and I’ve seen some babies created in very unimaginative ways….But I digress. Yeah, these are very important. But this leads me to another point:

Not everyone was popped out of their mom’s vagina, probably conceived in some unimaginative way, with a head and heart and soul full of the ability to create things beautiful. Sure, there are lots of people who are inherently artistic and capable of creating masterpieces on a whim, but most of us aren’t. Most of us who want to add our mark, splash some beauty, stir up trouble and feelings and thoughts, we need a little help. We need our dictionaries, our thesauri, our writers workshops to get us going, to get our juices flowing to somewhere besides our pants.

So, thank you O.E.D. Thank you Merriam and Webster. Thank you dictionary.com. Without you, I would’ve written the word ‘consummate’ earlier instead of ‘conceived’ because it’s 12:15 and my brain is now mush. Thanks.

P.S. for a great read, check out The Professor and the Madman: a tale of murder, insanity, and the making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester. Oddly enough, I pulled it off my shelf to find that it is wonderfully warped by something that was spilled on it. But I can still read the words.