More stuff about words (Post #2 concerning books)

When I was in grad school, I took a course that should have been called "Methods of Torturing Otherwise Sane People by Making them Look Up Things Like when the First Usage of the Word "Potable" Showed up in British Literature," but was instead called "Methods of Research and Bibliography." Oddly, I got really into using resources such as the OED to track down usages of certain words, and some of that fetish remains with me today. I love to find out what biases and prejudices some words have held in society throughout the last century.

Another book I bought (for around 2 cents probably) at the aforementioned bazaar was the (updated, mind you) 1938 Allen's Synonyms and Antonyms from Harper and Brothers. It is, truly, a goldmine of commentary (though it does not seem to intend to be) on the proper usages and meanings of various words in the American lexicon. My favorite section of the book is the brief preface entitled "How Shall I Say It?", which loftily assures me that, first of all, "...the richness of our English vocabulary betokens richness and variety of thought and experience", and secondly, that "Finding the right word builds vocabulary. The articulate man who is discriminating in his use of language has possessed himself of a valuable kind of power. How shall he say it?" God only knows what was to become of the articulate woman, as she was, in 1938, generally not presumed to need to possess herself of the kind of verbal ammunition referred to here. But I digress.

I also like this section because of the list of "chief explanatory terms" that accompany many of the words in the book--these explanatory terms are meant to let one know the subtleties of when/how a word should be used. And this section explains the explanatory terms. Here are a couple of the more snicker-worthy examples:

Obsolete: Abbreviated as obs. This term denotes a word no longer in common use, like horse-car or cotton for succeed.

Yes, indeed--I often need to be reminded that "horse-car" has fallen out of popular usage, as has "moving picture." I know, I know, it was 1938, but that really is funny to me.

rhetorical: This term indicates words which are characteristically used in language artificially or extravagantly elegant, or that specially seeks to convey an extreme or exaggerated effect, as where marmoreal is used for white, wroth for angry.

Well, shut my mouth.

This conception of the use of "rhetorical," though humorous and possibly somewhat offensive by today's standards (at least to rhetoricians), makes sense in context--in 1938, rhetorical education was still, presumably, in the throes of the belles-lettristic tradition, which in many colleges would have reduced the study and practice of rhetoric to mere ornamentation and style, which, in the eyes of many, came down to flowery or deceptive speech.

At any rate, I'll wrap this up with a lighthearted nod to early 80s era Sesame Street's "Sing Your Synonyms."

Pondering parachutes (Post #1 Concerning Books--the actual physical ones you can touch)

I am a sucker for cheap used books--especially those mysterious old ones you find at flea markets--the ones that make you sneeze when you open them. Recently, I attended a bazaar where all attendees were given a brown paper bag (a rather big one) and told we could fill it up with as much "stuff" as we wanted, and for each stuffed bag, we would only pay $2. I went directly to the book shelf, because, clearly, I gravitate toward that sort of thing rather than the aisles of sentimental junk that everyone is trying to get rid of in hopes it will become your sentimental junk.

One of the things I love about finding books at places like this, where the works are used and have probably been read by more than one person, is discovering the notes people absentmindedly leave in them. In a copy of What Color is Your Parachute, a work I am constantly referred to by other people but have never gotten around to reading (and, really, it seems a little late to be figuring out what color my parachute is, since I'm already pretty firmly entrenched in a career), I found the previous owner's rather interesting ruminations on his/her job history (this is probably writing prompted by one of the book's many exercises focusing on the question, "Who Am I?"). They were written on a series of small notes that had been torn from a pad, and they read thusly:

"Recorded some good music

Finished college--After having left college for a period of 2 1/2 years, I returned to school to earn a degree in Radio, Tv-Film. Lacking the required credits to easily transfer into the new out-of-state school, I returned to my previous school. Working nights, playing music for a living, I earned the credits to help me transfer out of state and earn my degree quickly and with high marks. My degree is from a large, state school, in a very competitive field requiring talent and technical skills."

The rest of the notes look as though the author would have liked to continue the trip down career memory lane, but each one only has a short phrase at the top: "played music for people," "ran a large store," "owned a shop-photo," "took some great pictures," "started my own paper route," "rebuilt a house."

I really wanted to know the rest of the story, and also whether this individual figured out the hue of his/her parachute and lived happily ever after. I even considered writing the rest of the story in order to give myself some closure. It would have gone something like this:

"Eventually, because I discovered my parachute is actually orange and not dark green, as I had originally assumed it was, it became apparent to me that my talents lay in a variety of other areas, such as ventriloquism and rodeo clown(ing?). I have now taken my act on the road, and people from all over pay big bucks to see my show in Vegas."

Instead, all I have is this strange, fragmented, vaguely sad, anonymous "message in a bottle" snapshot of someone's life through the terministic screen of his/her trying to figure out an identity.

What Color Is Your Parachute, despite the inclusion of a disturbing number of "Cathy" cartoons, is actually a pretty interesting read, by the way.

I hate traveling (warning--absolutely no academic content follows)

Really. I do. What I like least, I suppose, is the flying and the vague nausea and headache that stays with me for a day or two after a long flight (I should preface all this by saying that I flew back to Beaumont from San Francisco yesterday, and thus, I am still in the throes of some jetlagged crankiness). I should actually be grateful that the planes I've been in have never crashed. But that crushing boredom between takeoff and touchdown is what really gets to me. That and the patently offensive in-flight movies--yesterday, it was "The Women," and yes, I am completely embarrassed to say, I shelled out a dollar for the cheap headset (which, I kid you not, fell apart in my hand immediately after it was purchased, forcing me to do some pretty impressive makeshift engineering to get one headphone to work) to watch. "The Women" is one of those movies that is soaked in pathos but, ironically, is also so bad that I ended up hating all of the characters and not caring what happened to them at the end.

I did get some free food, though--a lunch consisting of a microwaved hamburger in a plastic bag (yeah, I know), a "salad" consisting of some room temperature iceberg lettuce and a tube of parmesan cheese dressing (which totally countered any nutritional value the "salad" might have otherwise had), and a mini KitKat. I ate all of it, by the way.

There, I said it. And I know I can't be the only one who abhors the process of travel.

Now I can get back down to the business of some scholarly writing and research...

Update:

OMG! Check out my distant colleague Cheryl Ball's blog post in which she vents about travel: http://www.ceball.com/blog/?p=418

Turns out she has had a similarly (but far worse in that it was even more tedious) dismal experience flying. But much of her post deals with traveling (by train) to and from the exact same conference! What a coincidence that we'd both blog about the same thing--cybertelepathy?