"Words, words, words . . ."

My intro to lit professor was trying to warn us a little, I think, but she just made me happier than ever to be in the class. She said that this semester we are going to have to memorize hundreds of literary terms and their definitions, and for some reason, I just wanted to get started then and there. I was trying to figure out why the phrase "memorize literary terms" had given me such a thrill, and I realized that there really hasn't been a time when learning new words didn't excite me. In fourth grade, I could spell all of the words that my teacher assigned me, so she had me make up my own spelling tests of ones I didn't know yet.

I have a history of getting lost in the dictionary. In high school, I kept lists of unfamiliar words that I encountered while reading, and then as a reward for myself after I finished a book, I would pull out my large navy-colored dictionary, which my parents gave me for Christmas one year. We had been visiting a friend of my dad's, who had a job playing Santa on a train in Perris. After all of my sisters sat on Santa's lap, I was cajoled into following suit, and so when he asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I told the truth: "A dictionary." The elves gave me a funny look.

I had really wanted an Oxford English Dictionary, but that would have been prohibitively expensive (and 20 volumes), so as a compromise, my parents found me the single-volume Oxford American Dictionary. And so I'd start out looking up the words I'd found in whatever I had been reading, but I'd quickly get serendipitously sidetracked. It's how I discovered excellent words like "philologist" or how to pronounce the "ae" in Old English (like the a in "cat").

And so that urge to know flared up in me again in class. When I learn new words, I receive more accurate ways to express myself. I can grasp for a more acute articulation, get closer to saying exactly what I mean. It's empowering, language is, giving us a medium through which to communicate what goes on inside our heads. The more words we have, the greater our opportunity to get as close to what we want to say as possible. I know that I, for one, just want to know what others are saying and have others know what I am saying. I have become increasingly aware of how dangerous it is to generalize out from myself, but I think I can say fairly confidently that at a fundamental level, we all want to understand and to be understood. With words we can begin to attempt this.