Word of the Day

A few weeks ago, I found my dictionary in the bathroom and started reading. The dictionary in question is a pocketbook-sized edition by Random House that dates back to 1980. Its pages are yellow from age, crumbly and folded from heavy use. Most of the time, it is stowed in a nightstand next to my bed along with a chaotic stack of books. Whenever I am reading in bed and need to look up a word, I can usually reach over without looking away from the book in my other hand and find the dictionary by its weathered feel.

I’m not sure how my dictionary ended up in the bathroom, but one morning I saw it there, picked it up and began flipping through the pages. It opened to a page seemingly of its own choosing. Two words in particular caught my eye, one right above the other: submerge and submerse. Submerge was defined as “to sink or plunge beneath the surface of a liquid.” Submerse was defined as “to submerge.” The question that came immediately to my mind was: why do we need two words, one letter apart, to say the same thing? I kind of feel bad for submerse, which seems to me like the underachieving and unpopular younger brother of submerge. Submerse? Oh yeah, we knew his brother submerge. Nice guy. He drowned, didn’t he? I am sure there is an etymological evolution that led to the “submerge versus submerse” distinction, but the pocketbook Random House volume simply does not have the space to devote to it.

Pretty much every day now, I pick my dictionary in the bathroom and allow it to randomly open to a page. Some days are more interesting than others. I am not so much looking to expand my vocabulary by learning long complex words. No, I am much more interested in the stories behind the words that point to the quirky nature of our language. The fact that there is a long word in English, sesquipedalian, that means “a long word” is reason enough for me to pick up a dictionary.

Sometimes, the words I focus on in my morning dictionary reading are words that I think I know, but always get wrong. Hoi polloi comes to mind. I always think that the word refers to “pretentious upper class people,” when in fact it means “common people, the masses, riffraff.” I wonder if the reason hoi polloi trips me up is because of its rhythmic pronunciation, not unlike highfalutin, which does mean pretentious!

Sometimes it is the second meanings of words that are more interesting to me than the first. Take “measly” for example. The first meaning, not surprisingly, deals with the infection commonly associated with the measles. The second meaning is “wretchedly scanty or unsatisfactory.” Huh? Waiter, this portion of lasagna you served me is measly, it reminds me of the red puss-filled sores that covered my body when I was younger. Take it away.

Then there are the words that I have never been able to spell. When I see them on a page of the dictionary it is as though I have turned the corner and encountered an old nemesis in an alleyway – Oh, you again! Despite my determined stare-down of the word, (damn it, I will get you this time!), despite projecting the word, letter-by-letter into my mind space using enormous bold fonts, I will still forget the correct spelling within ten minutes. That’s the way it is with bad spellers; it’s in our DNA. The other day, the dictionary opened to a page that contained the mother lode of words I can’t spell: the “bou” page. Bouffant. Bougainvillaea. Bouillabaisse. Bourgeois. Boutonnière. Hopeless, I tell you.

This morning was a great word: hors frost. It means simply “frost.” What’s the hors part? The Random House editors didn’t say. I could look it up in a bigger, more comprehensive dictionary. I could even Wikipedia it. Then again, the mystery is probably more interesting than the explanation.

What can I say? I like reading the dictionary. I have begun to look forward to my minute or two with the dictionary every morning. It beats the bad news of my morning newspaper. OK, one last dictionary gem: inestimable, "not able to be estimated." Seems straightforward enough. Would it be safe to assume, then, that the word estimable means the opposite: "easily estimated”? Well, no. Estimable means "deserving of praise." Go figure.