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Confessions
of a Word Collector What would you have expected from a teenager with raging hormones? Just the memory of the excitement that zipped through my spine as I slipped into my room (when nobody was looking) and the click of the door knob that made me weak in the knees with anticipation can still send the echoes of a shiver through me now. As usual, I would slip into bed, reach under my pillow and retrieve my most delicious secret: Pinky B. But Pinky B was only part of the stolen pleasure. Its accomplice was a thick dog-eared compact version of the OED (or Ox), one of the most titillating hand-me-downs that ever landed in bed with me. In tandem, Pinky B and Ox were the perfect bedfellows for a 14-year-old tomboy jock totally not interested in the opposite sex (with the powerful exception of Harrison Ford) but completely obsessed with creating and nurturing the image of "cool" among her peers. That's right, there are no better companions than a pink vocabulary notebook and an old dictionary respectively hidden under a pillow and bed when you are a nascent and closeted collector of words yet the--ostensibly, at any rate--very paragon of anti-establishmentarianism. It really wouldn't have been a cool thing to have your parents barge in on you with your nose in a book at the desk. That would have given them the satisfaction that you were actually doing something useful with your time, like--heaven forbid--studying. Being in bed with a book gave the impression that you were being totally cool and blase about the whole thing. Drives them nuts. Cool. "Hobbies are important," I was told, over and over. "Collect stamps," I was told, over and over. So collect stamps I did, but it did nothing for me (couldn't very well use them to send all my cool words across the globe, could I?). So collect coins I did too, but that did nothing for me, either (couldn't very well spend them, could I, so could someone please tell me the POINT of it all?). But what I did collect, indirectly at any rate, from my misadventures with old stamps was my first "curious" word, "philately". I found myself lying about collecting stamps just so I could say "philately". I remember the first time I said I was "into philately" when an adult asked me whether I had any "quiet hobbies" besides tae kwon do, volleyball, squash, basketball and skate-boarding. When the adult's jaw sagged with hapless and helpless wonder, a surge of quiet power as I had never experienced slithered through me. I knew a word which an ADULT was not familiar with. It then dawned on me that words, ephemeral as they seemed to people my age then, were indeed powerful tools. Yup, what a mind-blowing concept: words as your personalised power tools that you can mix 'n' match to suit the occasion! Besides, unlike collecting stamps and coins, collecting words could be done for free and the returns were immediate. This was my Epiphany. Thus is the genesis of what you could label--depending on the perspective you choose to take--my "romance" or "obsession" or plain old "mania" with words, their meanings and their etymologies or histories of their evolutions (and sometimes revolutions, not to mention their convolutions). Old Pinky B sits by my elbow even as I write this. I don't know where Ox is, though; my parents must have found it after I had left home to further my word obsession (I had taken Pinky B with me, of course, but Ox was too heavy) and given it away. Of course, they would never have imagined, then, that tattered Ox could ever have meant anything to me. However, my sorrow at Ox's loss has been somewhat alleviated by my thesaurus, Rog (imagine my joy and awe when, at 16, I discovered the phenomenon called a "thesaurus"). So what were/are some of the words that I had collected in my misspent youth? Well, entry #1 is "plutocracy" (talk about rich reading at 14), entry #31 is "onchocerciasis" (must have been during my Joseph Conrad stage), entry #238 is "sybaritic" (pleasure reading, I'm sure) and the last entry, #251, is "legerdemain" (must have really mesmerised and confounded some unsuspecting souls with this beauty). The rules for "collection" were that a word could only be gleaned from actual text that one was in the midst of reading; diving into a dictionary for a curious word out of context was forbidden. A dictionary was only a point of reference, not the source of curious words. My golden axiom then: A word out of context is a fish out of water (it'll suffocate in your mind without its proper context, die and you'd just forget its meaning in as many moments as it had taken you to understand it). What I should have done--you know, with the benefit of hindsight and all--was to record the text from which the word was gleaned and then to actually copy the context/sentence from which the juicy word was plucked. Since then, I have created many a Pinky B clone and one of the most fascinating things I have discovered through this exercise is that certain words keep popping up throughout. For example, the words "neoteny" (don't be such a child, go find out its meaning yourself), "eudemonic" (it's always such a joy to be reacquainted with this baby, though) and "otiose". Speaking of otiose, I rarely ever use these gems in my workaday (I now write for a living and I'm pretty sure that I'd be out of a job before you can say "emolument" if I were to do so). These days I don't collect as many curious words as I do the etymologies of simple, high frequency words such as "pal" and "mad". Now I dig deeper than just the topsoil for their meanings. How words change and evolve intrigue me no end. Why do I persist in this insanity? Well, because words, with their different shades of meaning, colour my thoughts. Literally, they lend meaning to my life. Besides, there's nothing like having your personal army of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers at your beck and call. Give it a try sometime. The author welcomes feedback at [email protected]
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