It all began with a college philosophy class in which the main readings were incomprehensible — baffling because of specialized words, mostly ancient Greek, that I suspect would have been head-scratchers to the average Athenian plying a trade in the old agora. Perhaps the archaic butter-and-egg man knew that eupraxia meant activities consistent with the moral virtues. But I didn’t and quickly realized that if I was going to have any hope of passing the Aristotle seminar I found myself in as an undergraduate, I was going to have to look it up.
Look it up and write it down. I soon learned what generations of students had learned before me: that it is easier to remember a specialized vocabulary if one writes out the words and their definitions, which I did in a little hardback notebook with “RECORD” stamped in gold on the front cover and words such as entelechy scribbled in the first few pages together with definitions helpful for test-taking but perhaps of less use in daily banter. I have yet to find an opportunity to slip into conversation that the entelechy theory of the soul maintains that the physiological process involved stands to the mental or physical process involved as matter to form. At least, that’s what I wrote down once upon a time. I can’t say it makes any sense to me now.
I’m looking at the notebook for the first time in decades. It’s an artifact unearthed as I reorganized my home office, an endeavor I would never have undertaken were it not for COVID-19. The pandemic is responsible for reminding me that I once made a practice of trying to know what I was reading.
I doubt I’m the only one who reads past words I can’t define, relying on the context to supply a rough and ready understanding of what is meant. But at least for a while, I was more pertinacious. After the philosophy class was done, I kept the notebook handy and wrote down any word with which I was unfamiliar. I would turn to a dictionary every week or so, looking up and writing down definitions.
This effort to reduce my nescience played into a taste for pleonastic persiflage. All too many of the words I scribbled out are ones I should have known by then. How, I wonder now, had I made it to college without being able to define gregarious, lubricious, or bumptious? Tincture, prevaricate, or eviscerate?
Among the words are some of my favorite type, the positive root of words known almost exclusively in their negative formulation: exorable (as opposed to inexorable), effable, superable, vidious. (Actually, I’m just kidding on that last one. As far as I know, there is no such word as vidious, and invidious stands on its own two legs).
There are the wonderful redundancies: If you have fulgent at hand, do you really need refulgent or effulgent?
But the best are words that have very little use, as far as meaning goes, but that give pleasure in the mere saying. I don’t mean phony flounces and furbelows, but words that have good mouthfeel: prognathous, glabrous, and (for those who haven’t left their houses in a year) nosophobia.
Plenty are the words about which I never got around to consulting the dictionary. Some found their way into my vocabulary nonetheless. How or when, I don’t know: cerulean, logorrhea, tatterdemalion. But some remain undefined, blank spots both in my notebook and my noggin.
Of the words I wrote down but never took the trouble to learn, some, such as costermonger, I assume to be obscure Britishisms. Perhaps I was reading Dickens. But others are simply obscure to me. What could I have been reading to pick up chryselephantine? Or esurient?
My notebook is a sort of haphazard record of the books I’ve read without properly understanding their meaning. But it’s never too late. If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some words to look up. I think I’ll start with skimmington.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
