For the use of dictionaries and other extraneous materials

[Paul Mackin]

On May 2, 2006, at 3:58 PM, davemarc wrote:

> Henry Miller wrote an essay, "Early Reading," in which he  
> celebrated the
> dictionary. An excerpt:
>
> "I had believed, as everyone does, that in obtaining a definition  
> one got
> the meaning of, or shall I say the 'truth,' about a word. But that  
> day,
> shifting from derivation to derivation, thereby stumbling upon the  
> most
> amazing changes in meaning, upon contradictions and reversals of  
> earlier
> meanings, the whole framework of lexicography began to slither and
> slide...."
>
> Miller was writing about his beloved Funk & Wagnall's unabridged  
> dictionary,
> but I think his words are extremely relevant in terms of Pynchon's  
> writing.
> The essay can be found in Miller's collection *The Books in My Life*.
>
> d.
>



Not to be too flippant I hope, but when I used to hear one of the boys
on "Laugh In" say "Look THAT up in you Funk & Wagnall's," I never could
help but wonder what good following that suggestion would have been.

OK, so the crack really had nothing to do with  the use of   
dictionaries. . . . "Funk
& Wagnall's" is just  a funny word, like "puke" on Seinfeld.

Anyway, dictionaries are  one of the wonders  of the world and do  
attempt
to give the best accounting possible of the use of language. But it  
is one of the
functions of writers (and this goes for comedians as well) to be  
constantly
providing dictionary makers with new material.  Moreover, a fairly  
bewildering
thing about the use of language, relating to dictionaries, especially  
in fiction,
is that sometimes the  "right" word is the wrong word, given what the  
writer is
trying to achieve, and sometimes the "wrong" word is the right word.

Not  right and wrong in terms of "correct" and "incorrect I don''t mean.

None of which is meant to imply I don't think writers should keep a  
dictionary on their
bedside table.