The Death of the Dictionary

My late father, bless him, was always trotting out not-so-subtle ways to improve the education of his children. We were voracious readers, and, as any reader knows, this means one is likely to come across an unfamiliar word, especially if said reader is 8 years old.

When I would ask my father for a definition — for "belie" or "derive," for instance — he would always say, "Son, I’m not sure, but I know someone who does — his name is Mr. Webster."

Thus informed, Dad and I would embark upon a 10-minute trudge through the dictionary. He would make me look up the word, pronounce it, read the definition, and, if he was in a particularly didactic mood, force me to use the word in a sentence. "’I belied reading the dictionary,’" I would say.

Though young, I was not stupid. I finally learned to ask my mother for definitions. Or I’d ask while we were in the car, Mr. Webster safely ensconced at home.

I thought of my father when I came across "Best Online Tools for Word Nerds." It claims the old-fashioned, paper dictionary is an artifact, as antiquated as rotary-dial phones and three-piece plaid leisure suits: "When you need a word’s definition, translation, pronunciation, synonym, or antonym, you don’t have to haul an enormous tome from the bookshelf, dust it off, and ruffle through its delicate pages like your grandparents used to do—you can just hop on the [I]nternet."

Though I would be lying if I said I didn’t use sites like dictionary.com with some frequency, the above reads like someone who hasn’t read a book in about four years, when he graduated college.

OED: DOA?

But, as a writer of literary fiction, if you get rid of paper dictionaries, I might as well admit defeat and just write Smurf porn fan fiction. No, the fact that dictionary sales have plummeted does not mean that people are going to stop buying novels, especially the kind that features shoes and clothes like in "Sex in the City" (not to mention that features guys like Mr. Big, who apparently earned this nickname not through the immensity of his manhood but by his financial ability to effortlessly buy $25 million co-ops and transform them into temples of haute couture, if not a brothel).

What I’m saying is that you need serious readers for serious fiction — the kind of fiction that has words one must consult a dictionary to understand.

Now, if any of you are a word nerd as described above, you know that when you look up a single word in the dictionary, it can take 10 minutes — not because your father is forcing you to pronounce "langunious," but because you have spent that time in the endeavor of looking up other words. This is one of the rare pleasures of a dictionary that can be mimicked only by losing oneself in an encyclopedia (or, vast amounts of online p.o-r-n.). 

Admittedly, I’ve already foresaken the encyclopedia in favor of Google. Instead of looking up information that may or may not exist, I can immediately get an always-accurate datapoint via our friends at Wikipedia or elsewhere. Lots of people with bigger brains, larger vocabularies, and less bitterness have waxed eloquently on the demise of research vis a vis the Internet, and I won’t add my opinion here, because it’s really not worth the virtual page it’s written upon.

Language takes a Pound-ing

But online dictionaries are like getting a prostitute versus nurturing a long relationship — one is faster, and you get something approximating pleasure, but the alternative, filled with missteps and hard work, is always far more rewarding. If people aren’t curious about words, they’re not going to care much about language, and le mot juste will remain an untranslated piece of pointless French.

The debasement of language can be directly traced to the decline of literary fiction and poetry (and conversely), and if people aren’t thumbing through their dictionaries, enjoying the langorous pleasures of new words, they rarely will give a damn whether or not your story is well-written or not.

Whew. I can feel my constipation clearing up already.