A confession: In elementary school, I was one of those odd children who sat up in their rooms and would spend many a happy hour curled up with an aged encyclopedia. I had a full set of 1976 World Books along with a dictionary, thesaurus, and rhyming dictionary, and I regularly browsed all of them. Words, I would declare to anyone who would listen, are really cool.
Somewhere along the way, my active word mongering tapered to an at-arms-length fascination and I've never quite made the plunge into making words my life. Reading about people who have and living vicariously through them, however, has worked out pretty well for me. So ever since reading this New York Times book review, I've been meaning to pick up Ammon Shea's Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. Finally - finally! - I have.
Ammon Shea is, without a doubt, one of Those People. He collects and reads dictionaries and sits in the basement of a library ten hours a day, every day, absorbed in his reading. In one anecdote, he discusses how he felt he should be out and about, so he wandered New York for a better reading place, before realizing that the setting shouldn't matter. Books hold all the environment that he needs. (And back to the basement he went.) To be honest, it'd be easy to label him a weirdo and go on with your day, but that would be missing out on the palpable joy he gets delving into words. He gives the impression of reading definitions like sipping wine, savoring the depth and flavor of each word.
His book, Reading the OED, is a twenty-eight chapter book starting with an introductory Exordium and ending with an Excursis. The twenty-six chapters between are divided into letters and have the dual purpose of telling the story of how he got to reading the OED and of being a place where he can share some of his notes on each letter. In the narrative, he writes about himself, as a reader and a collector, and how he got around to, well, reading the OED. It is fascinating, because he makes the whole endeavor seem so obvious, so inevitable. By the end of the book, you're thoroughly doused in his worldview, and it seems perfectly normal to read dictionaries. The entire thing is charming in a way that few books manage, simply because he downplays the uniqueness. Everyone has their hobbies, and he is content to share his:
"Some people find it odd that I take such pleasure in an activity that is so inherently Sisyphean. Of course, I don't find it odd at all: think about your favorite book, and how endlessly satisfying it would be if that book never really ended. The dictionary is my favorite book, and even if I did one day manage to read all the way through every dictionary and wordbook I own, I could always go back to the beginning and start again. It's certain that by that point I will have forgotten enough of what I've already read to make it just as interesting as the first time through."
He comes across as earnest even through the slight self-deprecation. It is clear that while there is an element of forcing himself through the book (see also: the un- words and the bibliography), he is reading it largely because he enjoys it. What makes it even more interesting was that he included the negative side-effects of the hobby. He would read until his vision greyed out at the periphery, and he says his eyesight has suffered noticeably. He has a twitch in his left eye, and he gets back pains from sitting over the OED for a year straight. For all that he is absorbed in the work of collecting words in the abstract, just as dictionaries are a means of learning words, his body is a vessel for his mind, and bodies require a notorious amount of upkeep. Despite the aches and pains, he is doing what he loves, and that comes across.
In addition to the narrative, the chapters finish with a list of a few words within the letter that he found notable in some way. Shea paraphrases the definitions and annotates them with pithy and frequently hilarious comments. The words range from humorous ("unbepissed," which means precisely what you think it means) to charming ("happify") to odd stops in between ("gymnologize," which, if you are curious, means "to dispute naked, like an Indian philosopher," or "levament" and "gove" which both include asides about lexicographers and their quirks).
Both aspects of the book -- the narrative and the notes -- are enjoyable, but together they make the book a little bit clunky. It's a bit startling to go from reading about James Murray, the original editor-in-chief of the OED, and his cantankerous responses to detractors to a list of words with the -ee suffix (among the list: beatee, someone who is beaten; flingee, someone at whom something is flung; and laughee, someone who is laughed at). This is doubled by the fact that the narrative frequently doesn't have to do with the letter its tabled under. There are a few delightful exceptions, like discussing the caper-like quality of I, the self-explanatory agony of U and it's many un- words, and the shortness of X, but for the most part, they're just interesting observations, not necessarily contemporaneous with the point in the dictionary that he's at.
Overall, Reading the OED is a refreshingly happy book. It is a book precisely about enjoying the little things in life and about how the unexpected sparks of joy make up for a length of tedium. The fact that it's about words and dictionaries is just bonus points. And, if you're a word nerd or entertain thoughts of being one, it's a lot of really joyous bonus points that'll make you eye the nearest dictionary.
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