I suppose this
“writing thing” was inevitable.
Paper and pens
were my preferred toys when I was little –- for drawing, scribbling words,
making large bubble letters that were strung together into nonsense
sentences. While other little girls played
with dolls, I fashioned a stationery store in my bedroom, complete with a desk
as a counter, a partitioned box as a cash register, and displays of supplies
that I’d gathered from drawers and shelves all over the house. When my forbearing father wanted to use a
stapler, he was forced to buy it back from me for the exhorbitant sum of a
nickel.
I never cared
much about the money. The real gift was getting to write out the receipt –- a
piece of paper on which I’d painstakingly drawn straight lines with a ruler,
and could now fill in with item, price and even some sort of tax. I’d take the nickel with all the solemnity of
a shopkeeper, and then cheerfully say, “Thank you for coming in today, sir!”
I can’t tell
you how many times my sweet father bought that stapler from me.
Those low-tech
times gave me the opportunity to decide that I was going to read the dictionary
from beginning to end –- and I’m aware that this puts me firmly into some sort
of “club,” as I’ve heard the same thing from many other writers since. But if I close my eyes, I can still feel the
fragile pages with their gold-painted half-moons, just the size of a child’s
thumb, each with a letter.
And like many
others, after a stab at “begin with A, and go through Z,” it became a sort of
metaphysical scattershot method of tightly shutting my eyes, opening the book,
and dropping my finger onto the page. I
began to imagine that the word thus randomly chosen could inform and direct my
day. “Voyager” meant a walk around the
block, “mottled” indicated I should spend time in the garden peering at leaves,
“kabob” meant searching out skewers and stringing Cheerios on them for
breakfast.
I think I’ve
never looked up a word in a dictionary that I didn’t also learn another
one. As I scanned the columns, reading
aloud, my forefinger traced a line from top to bottom of the list of words -- I
was like a puppy, “What’s this? What’s
that?” It took forever to look up a word, because
“neophyte” would yield “necromancy,” “nefarious,” “negligent,” and “nemesis” on
a path to the definition.
I thought
words were little miracles, really. Sets
of letters that meant something. I was
fascinated by “The Miracle Worker,” and that moment when Helen Keller realizes
that letters make words, and words have meaning.
All this is
not to say that I believed the best words were the most complicated or
obscure. My college Communications
thesis was a “readability study” of the university’s catalogue, a book sent out
to high school seniors, hoping they’d enroll.
Through in-depth counting of the types, sizes and clarity of the words
used in the catalogue, I determined that you needed to be in your second year
of Graduate School to properly understand it.
My professor sent the study on to the Admissions Department with a wry
smile.
And my love affair with words continues today. Dictionary.com has a
“popular searches” column, a word of the day, and a new Beta program called Word Dynamo that estimates your
vocabulary. The website functions for me
in the same way those delicate pages did so long ago –- you can even “Browse
Dictionary” randomly -- it’s the best of technology, I think, when it mimics
the real thing in spirit.
In the
end, I can imagine myself in the last moments of life, trying to describe
it, saying, “What’s the word I’m looking for….?” Ah, yes…“transition…that's it...”
~~~~~
