Wild Words I Have Met

MY paternal grandfather, by all accounts, was a bizarre creature. It was his wont to while away particularly long, chill New England evenings — of which, so it would seem, there were a great many — by reading Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. The evenings must have been very long and extremely chilly, because, according to a family tradition, he actually reached ‘zythum’ before death claimed him. The matter is not so delicately personal as it may appear to be. It has had a very definite effect upon my own destiny, and that effect in turn is the cause of this essay.

Nowadays, as every good amateur biologist knows, the inheritance of acquired characteristics is impossible. A man may spend his entire lifetime riding around in an automobile, and yet his children will positively not be born legless. For many years there was some uncertainty in the matter,and the tails of thousands upon thousands of rats were consequently cut off in the most approved manner, in order to prove that a motorist’s children are not born legless. Nothing happened, save that the rats which had been operated on became tailless. And this occasioned a great scandal in science. There was a pretty how-do-you-do when scientists were faced by the astonishing fact that a rat merely loses its tail when you remove it. However, fortunately for the rats, continuing these experiments indefinitely appeared needless; and thereafter a heresy became respectable. A lost tail (no matter who has lost it) is never inherited. Nowadays everyone knows this, and — if a personality will again be pardoned — my own life proves it. My paternal grandfather ploughed through the whole of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary until he got to ‘zythum’ — and yet I was born without any vocabulary whatsoever.

Nevertheless, in some way which I cannot undertake to explain, my grandfather’s penchant for reading the dictionary was eventually handed on to me, and was hardly damaged at all during transit. His accumulated vocabulary, as I have just confessed, was lost somewhere by the wayside, but the penchant itself arrived in apple-pie order, along toward the close of the last century. And almost before I knew it I, too, was reading the dictionary like my ancestor.

Being not yet so full of years as my forbear, I have fallen far short of zythum. Indeed, to be quite frank, I doubt whether I ever shall reach zythum — or even xylyl or zyme, for that matter — by the dignified route of the English alphabet. What with daylight saving, steam heat, and relativity, long chill evenings at the present time are rare commodities. The modern evening, to be as lenient toward it as possible, is a very flashy affair. ‘Good heavens! where has the evening gone?’ is a question that one hears repeatedly.

But my temperament also is responsible for my defections. Nature may hate a saltus, but I like one. The slightest possible stimulus leads me to leap boldly from one letter to another; and I am just as likely to leap backward as forward. I have no doubt that I should leap sidewise, were that possible. The habit, of course, is a reprehensible one, and the pure blood of lexicographers is not in me. But at least I can say this, in extenuation of a habit which I blush for: I have contrived, despite the ephemeral nature of the modem evening, to read considerable portions of the dictionary. What is more, those portions which I have read are the most interesting. In consequence of all of which I have succeeded, over a period of many years, in accumulating a stock of words that are — and I say so with a scholar’s pride — as magnificent in their uselessness as a rainbow.

Potamology, for example, is one of those fascinating words which I long ago ran across on my rhapsodic rambles. Potamology is the science of rivers. To this day I have not discovered what the science of rivers actually is, or possibly could be; but that is what potamology is, beyond argument. One engaged in such an adventure as mine will not strain at a meaning if he can get a polysyllable.

Another word similar to potamology is pomology — similar, I mean, in delicious uselessness. I am free to confess that I feel particular affection for potamology, but pomology stirs up nearly as much emotion. For pomology is the science of fruit, whatever the science of fruit may be; and there you have it — if I am not repeating myself — beyond argument. I do not know what the science of fruit is, or possibly could be. Perhaps it is the art of selling three five-cent pears for a quarter. I do not know, and I do not care. I know that pomology is the science of fruit, as potamology is the science of rivers, and I wish no further information on the subject. In such toothsome discoveries lies the full succulent reward of any man who reads the dictionary for pure pleasure.

I have said that words very frequently are useless; I have even admitted that the glittering uselessness of many words in our dictionary is comparable with that of a rainbow. And yet, in admitting this, it is necessary to propound a profound question. Is it not folly to call objects useless which can give a human being inordinate pleasure? The reader of a dictionary knows the answer. He knows that a word, in and of itself, divorced from every reasonable prospect of ever appearing in written or spoken language, affords delight that is unanswerable and incomparable. Indeed, the less use the word has the more it pleases him. Anyone can talk of science and rivers; only the man who truly loves words for their own sake is in a position to talk of potamology, for he alone is aware of its existence.

And as much might be said of dysphagia, of anoxaemia, of xerostomia, of spanopncea, of balneotherapeutics. Your crass pragmatic mind, insensible to the doctrine of pure uselessness, will find in such trophies no smallest interest. If he allows these words any right to flourish at all, he does so for the most pitiful of reasons: either he grudgingly grants that ‘difficulty in swallowing ’ is a long way of pronouncing ‘ dysphagia’ (in which event mere economy might sanction it) or, impressed by the ragtags of pseudo-scholarship, he tolerates the word on account of its origin. To have Greek complications in one’s larynx, when one tries to swallow such a vocable, is certainly no trivial distinction. But your true logophile is only saddened by vulgar interests of this nature. He would be dissatisfied were ‘dysphagia’ indefinable, for a word without a definition is not one. Beyond this one law of verbal existence, however, he cares only for the word itself and never for its meaning. He would be quite as well pleased, would your courser after strange words in verbal forests, if dysphagia proved to be a religion or a musical instrument. That fascinating little furred creature which he had bagged would still be the same fascinating little furred creature — a brand-new word which the depths of a dictionary had suddenly yielded him.

Such a word as ‘pnigalion’ would therefore be brought down with delight also; nor would that delight be diminished had this word happened to mean a Chinese coin, or a vegetable, or an Act of Congress, instead of the thing that it does mean — namely, a nightmare. And psilanthropist is in precisely the same position. And so, for that matter, is acrolein, and tephramancy, and aprosexia; propylguiacol, and xenoglossia, and amblyopia; amaurosis, and omphacine, and prosopopoeia. For all that your dictionary reader cares to the contrary, a psilanthropist might be related to the pterodactyl, and acrolein might be related to acropolis. Nay, were potamology the science of crossing potatoes with tomatoes, the fascination of that word would not suffer. Still would it be a verbal trophy to delight the eye and gladden the heart of its captor.

We are not, I suppose, a great company — we who, with electric lamps for lanterns, prowl about in the forests of language. But what we want in numbers we more than make good in enthusiasm. Hunters by nature, we are forever hunting. Big game we naturally prefer to smaller quarry, and a polysyllable gets a lustier cheer than a monosyllable. But in our hearts there is no distinction between triumphs. The humblest new capture, so far as our proud delight in it goes, is exactly as good as the mightiest.