DICTIONARIES
My History

Glenn Lehman

I missed Noah Webster’s (1758-1843) birthday—October 16. Some call it Dictionary Day. Like I ever knew there was such a thing!

Before Webster compiled the 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language, all dictionaries were English. With his work Webster declared linguistic freedom for America. He made catalog from catalogue and color from colour. His tung for tongue never won the day.

From my childhood on, people around me talked about words and checked dictionaries. They could delight in a word’s obscurity, length, spelling, origin, or ability to rhyme or make rhythm or puns. My father liked preachers who could use a big 75-cent word from time to time. Relatives often went to the bookshelf below the record player to settle a verbal dispute with a dictionary. "Gloaming. Is that twilight? Before or after nightfall?" I picked up the bug of logophilia. Until 1990 I lived in the age of the dictionary. Now I still like a dictionary close at hand, but more often I use the computer spell-check.

My relationship with the dictionary has evolved. Awe was my first feeling; early on I served the dictionary as an acolyte serving a deity. I trusted the experts to tell me how to spell niece or sycophant or potato. At puberty I entered a prurient stage in my relationship with the dictionary. I’d look up glans, vas deferens, coitus, or other salacious marriage manual words. At this stage I also plied Leviticus for rare prohibitions.

When high school teachers required dictionary work, I entered a dread stage. If I couldn’t spell a word, how could I find it? Hours were lost trying to find gnaw, tsoriasis, or philology. The dread turned to confidence, the confidence became pride. I even sported a German-English, Latin-English, or other two-language dictionary, a sure sign of erudition in the hallway—and a one-way pass to geekdom.

By college the possession of a prominently displayed, huge dictionary lent an air of gravitas to my dorm room. Go ahead—enter my room and say "ain’t" or "he don’t" or pronounce it "filum" or "ek cetera." Say "libary" or "nucular." After you leave, the dictionary will console me with superior knowledge.

When I turned about age 20, a period of doubt eclipsed confidence. I became aware that dictionaries do not all reach the same conclusions. That dawned on me about the time I had to acknowledge that Bible translations and ancient manuscripts do not always agree word for word.

Then a period of retrenchment came. New words made me recoil with denial and then with fear. When did radar first appear? Airport? Biosphere? At that time I learned that new species of germs emerge regularly—especially when we fight them. That called into question when God finished the business of creation. I wanted an English created in six days, then frozen for eternity.

I remember when "ain’t" appeared for the first time in a dictionary. Having just mastered the basics, I didn’t want the standards to change. I had learned that dictionaries were meant to be prescriptive. Now would they be merely descriptive? So, if the masses insisted on vulgarizing speech with "ain’t," would lexicographers simply roll over? I wanted our language to be controlled by snobs who still wrote memos in Latin.

I found this both useful and frightening. In the work of music and worship planning I passed through denial and resistance, then hope and love. Shall we choose hymns the people want or hymns the hymnologists want? Finally one sees these choices in language and the arts as an eternal dialogue, the popular benefiting from the learned and vice versa.

Words beguile us into thinking they are mere symbols, a shorthand way to point out things and actions. But no. Words point to more than objects and actions. They go on to connote cultural habitats, even economy and class. The difference between a dialect and a language, they say, is an army.

I further discovered each dictionary edition had unique strengths. Each publisher had a particular entry style. Then also I became aware of lodes of richer information. I read entries to their obscure ends. I delighted in etiology, the ancestry of words, even dates and citations of usage.

As Bible publishing has its leather binding and Indian paper, dictionaries have their own ways to inspire devotion. The index thumb tabs, making them in that way so like some Bibles, gave them their own holy aura and increased the reverence I held for these books about words.

The huge unabridged dictionary in most libraries, enthroned on its own special stand, had fostered that notion. Today I walk into the local library and cluck at the budget they have for Internet service. Somewhere behind the stacks or in the reference section mopes a rejected unabridged. I look up a word to make it feel useful. I know I’ve entered the mature collaborative stage.

—Glenn Lehman, Leola, Pennsylvania, fantasizes about being born like a hymn, from the conjunction of words and music. And like a child who needs to please both parents, he has been trying to report on life in both music and words ever since. In the past 10 years, he has found a niche in early American church music as director of Harmonies Workshop.