Library Corner
The library in our house dates from 1915. Previously a kitchen, the room fell victim to a fire and my grandmother – who was much fonder of reading than of cooking – had it rebuilt as a library. She didn’t forgo a kitchen entirely, of course. It also was rebuilt a few rooms to the west of its original location.
The books in the library are arranged more-or-less by section: the children’s books, poetry, history, foreign language, fiction, and so forth. During my lifetime, I’ve read books from most sections (foreign language not so much) and always thought that “when I retire” I would round out my education by reading the remainder. But, come to find out, my aging eyes don’t do so well with the very small print in many of those old books. Another life lesson re-learned: don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today!
Still, I do dip into them now and then. One of the pleasures of reading old books is in making the re-acquaintance of words that seem to have dropped by the wayside. ‘Hasten’ for example. So much more expressive than ‘hurry.’ Or ‘weary,’ which conveys that little nuance of displeasure that ‘tired’ does not. They say that there are about 600,000 words in the English lexicon of which the average person uses only 10,000. I guess that as we add words like ‘ecotown,’ ‘unfriend,’ and ‘teabagger’ (all 2009 choices by the New Oxford American Dictionary), we perforce drop some of the less-used, “old-fashioned” words. Heaven forbid we should actually increase that average number by a few thousand words!
Well, ‘perforce’ is a word that I haven’t seen or heard about before.
Yes, ‘perforce’ is another example of a word that my dictionary lists as “obsolete.” Too bad. It’s a useful one so I’m not giving it up!
I love that a love of reading and words can be and often is passed on from generation to generation. I think both my parents, being not only avid readers, but poets and lovers of poetry, passed it on to me.
From the time my Matthew was quite young, we always talked about writing our own dictionary, using words like “yerm” (the sound a car makes when it goes fast around the corner), or “eerch” (the sound a car makes when it comes to a rapid stop). We never wrote that dictionary, but I loved that he was learning to love language as much as I do.
Today, in the course of any conversation, it is not uncommon for either of my children to interrupt a sentence to say, “I love that word!”
What a great idea — writing your own dictionary! It’s not too late! I have a couple that you could add. When my son was three or so he used to worry that the water in the bathtub would “overfloat.” About the same time, he told me that he thought granny (my mom) was “volumptuous.” And he thought sheep were “wooly piggies,” which is what the family still calls them. But here’s my favorite: in his nursery school (it was in dark ages before “day care”) they were reviewing a little music unit they had studied. The teacher asked “What do you call it when two people sing the same song at the same time?” A long silence and then my son piped up, “A coincidence!”