{"id":3014,"date":"2023-08-03T13:17:59","date_gmt":"2023-08-03T19:17:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=3014"},"modified":"2023-08-03T13:17:59","modified_gmt":"2023-08-03T19:17:59","slug":"my-precioussss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=3014","title":{"rendered":"My Precioussss…."},"content":{"rendered":"

Arrived this week as two BIG, HEAVY\u00a0 boxes was a used copy of a 45 year old\u00a0 Oxford English Dictionary<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 Our Compact OED<\/em>, which I used heavily while writing the Deed of Paksenarrion, Surrender None, and Liar’s Oath, <\/em> is beyond my eyesight now, even with reading glasses and a magnifying glass..\u00a0 But it was invaluable.\u00a0 At that time I still had my HS graduation thesaurus as well, but the Compact OED gave me enough of the history and alternate meanings of words to provide a precision the thesaurus was never meant to achieve.\u00a0 But as I said, with succeeding years it became harder to use it once my eyes started giving me more and more difficulty.\u00a0 That row of cream-colored volumes in the picture is\u00a0 of the 13 volumes of the 1978 printing of the Oxford English Dictionary<\/em>.\u00a0 12 volumes + supplement volume.\u00a0\u00a0 The words sit over there, chattering quietly to one another, bumping elbows sometimes, from volume to volume.\u00a0 And I’m renewing my acquaintance with this very senior member of the family of Engilsh dictionaries, first met in Fondren Library of Rice University.\u00a0 It’s not the latest…but it contains things from before the first.\u00a0 One of the words I looked at yesterday, when it arrived, is referenced to a Psalter<\/em> in 885 CE with another reference to it in 1000 in Beowulf.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

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The advantage of such a research tool for writers?\u00a0\u00a0 Great is too narrow a word. \u00a0\u00a0 It’s historical, which means the etymology of the words goes back to the first recorded print source in England, and usage is recorded as “Obs” or “Archaic” but not ignored to give just the modern. \u00a0 That’s how I learned today that “deploy” was originally cognate with “display” in the sense of “spread out to be more visible.”\u00a0 Troops deployed meant a close formation opened out…not at all what it means in US usage today.\u00a0 Any recorded use of the word from the first time it’s known to have shown up is included.\u00a0 It’s that long because there’s information in there, most of it information useful to writers.\u00a0\u00a0 If you want every word to fit (“the right word in the right order”)\u00a0 like a puzzle piece with the other words, it helps to know more, to grasp its entire history, the forces that shaped it.<\/p>\n

The latest printing runs to 20 volumes, so of course has even more words, and takes up half again as much space, but this one is close to the one I used at Rice from time to time (actually, I mostly got into it for fun and relaxation and satisfying curiosity.)\u00a0 I also played around in dictionaries of various sciences.\u00a0 But I knew enough of the OED to know I wanted one.\u00a0 We pounced on the Compact OED<\/em> as soon as we heard about it; we used it for decades, including playing OED Scrabble with friends (any word that was in the OED was fine, but only in the main entry, not all the variant spellings….except in some sessions.)\u00a0\u00a0 Made for slow Scrabble, but two of the other players would run a game of chess concurrently, one would read a book, and I would play with the dictionary between needing to look things up.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I’m already enjoying this moderate monster.\u00a0 I’ve done only two directed searches so far; most of it’s been opening a volume randomly, looking on the two visible pages to see what looks interesting and writing down any unfamiliar words.\u00a0 That got me “fife-rail, eadi, luddock, lue, maritage, marish, pun (not *that* pun), punatoo, starkle, stote, sumph, hopdog, hore, hoppet, and huik”, none of which I knew, and several pages of history and past usages of “stark,” some additional usages of “stot” …both words I thought I knew.\u00a0\u00a0 Today I looked up a word from Lee & Miller’s book Trade Secret….<\/em>“replevin” as in “a writ of replevin” and got its complete etymology and expanded meaning.\u00a0\u00a0 Plus other words last night and today I didn’t actually write down (silly me; I don’t have an instant very sticky memory for words the way I did as a younger person, when absorbing vocabulary was easy.)\u00a0 But I’m getting the kind of “deep awareness” of many of the words that made me confident in Paksworld when I started it and will restore some of that “feel” in Horngard.\u00a0 For instance, there’s a scene in which Our Hero is talking to some displaced persons in hill country, who speak a variant dialect.\u00a0\u00a0 The OED has plenty of those–genuine\u00a0 archaic terms and spellings linked to their usage in different counties in the UK, so…I can sprinkle them in where they go.<\/p>\n

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Arrived this week as two BIG, HEAVY\u00a0 boxes was a used copy of a 45 year old\u00a0 Oxford English Dictionary.\u00a0\u00a0 Our Compact OED, which I used heavily while writing the Deed of Paksenarrion, Surrender None, and Liar’s Oath, is beyond my eyesight now, even with reading glasses and a magnifying glass..\u00a0 But it was invaluable.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61,53,5],"tags":[62,112,12,107],"class_list":["post-3014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-craft","category-life-beyond-writing","category-the-writing-life","tag-craft-of-writing","tag-life-beyond-writing","tag-research","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3014"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3014"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3014\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3018,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3014\/revisions\/3018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}