Why are dictionaries so boring? I often wondered as a child.
Even then I thought of words as crackling like a wood fire,
warm and loud. I thought of words as big, round, plump with possibilities. Even then I knew that like a fire they could sometimes get out of control. They could burn a little too hot.
Yet, the dictionary was just... gray. The words felt trapped there on the pages. Weighted down and hogtied into type.
My grandfather was a gardener. He grew carrots and
potatoes and green beans and big tangles of rhubarb on a double-lot in suburban New Hampshire.
In Quebec, where he was born, he would have been a farmer. But, in the US, he was an immigrant factory worker who gardened on nights and weekends, nurturing things in the soil. And probably also within himself.
He barely spoke English, so he and I never
really talked. But I loved to skulk around his property; inside, the grownups were speaking in French anyway, so I’d never overhear anything I understood.
I inspected the garden itself. The cinderblock single-car garage my grandfather used as a gardening shed. The abandoned chicken coop where my mother told me thrilling stories of chicken executions. (The single chop of the ax. The blood. The way the chicken actually
did run around with its head cut off.)
Terrifying. Wonderful. Tell it again.
The tools in his cinderblock shed were as foreign to me as my immigrant grandfather. The weak New England sun streamed through the window at harvest time and lit the blades of this spikey thing hanging by its peg on the wall, making it look alive and
aggressive and ready for action, even if I didn’t know what kind of action, exactly.
Come at me, kid. Take me outside. Plunge me in the dirt and let’s see what we dig up. It looked like it could draw blood. Terrifying. Wonderful.
I’d like to say that those tools ignited something inside me.
I’d like to say that I lifted those tools off the wall and took them outside and dug around in the dirt.
But I never did. I just looked. Always, I spent a lot of my childhood just looking.
The truth is that those tools scared me a little bit, not unlike my mother’s chicken
stories.
The inside of my grandfather’s gardening shed felt ripe and wet. It smelled of early springtime all year round. The sharp edges of the tools. Their foreignness. It was all too much for me to handle, even if I was strangely attracted to it.
Two Sets of Tools
It would be years before I truly appreciated the inside of that gardening shed and, of course, my grandfather.
By then, he would be long gone. A house would be built on the second lot behind his house where he once grew carrots and potatoes and that rhubarb.
The spikey thing was gone, too. It was a
spike aerator, by the way, and my grandfather used it to turn over soil to help air and water reach his plants’ roots.
It would also be years before I thought of the parallel between one set of tools (the sharp thrill of the foreign, the implied danger) with the second (the flat grayness of words hung up to dry in the dictionary).
Every gardener regularly reaches into his or her shed for some version of a spikey thing. And we writers regularly unshackle prickly, wonderful, magical words from the dictionary page—and use them to aerate our thoughts and ideas and stories.
But still the problem of the dictionary has always rankled me. By definition, most treat language as a thing that needs to be controlled, alphabetized, categorized,
proscribed, prescribed: Take two variants and call me in the morning.
Dictionaries serve up definitions and parts of speech, but they strip out color. Most present words with the same luster as a carburetor manual. Which is to say, none at all.
Early on I stopped using dictionaries as a place to find meaning (literally and metaphorically,
come to think of it...).
I instead started using a battered copy of Roget’s Thesaurus to look up words I didn’t know. Roget's didn’t serve up a definition for a specific word. But it told me who its friends were: You can tell a lot about any one by who it hangs around.
More recently I’ve come to rethink dictionaries and I’ve found
other kinds of word directories. (Thank you, Generous Internet Beast!) I use them to look up words I don’t know and, more recently, words I already know.
What are those sources?
And why should you look up words you already know?
Let’s start this 6th issue of
Total Annarchy right there, mmkay?
WRITING
1.
It might be heretical to talk about my early disappointment in dictionaries this week—because this Saturday (April 14) is the 190th anniversary of the publication of Noah Webster’s celebrated dictionary and its make-words-great-again title, An American Dictionary of the English Language.
But it’s not really heretical, because my perspective is as a writer—not a lexiconagrapher. (Lexiconagraphist? Lexiconist? Spellcheck help me out here... ah, lexicologist!)
What’s more, dictionaries have evolved. The Internet has made dictionaries come as alive as the tools in my grandfather’s shed, which is why the browser tab I have open almost all day is Merriam-Webster.
If Noah Webster sought to purify and standardize the English language, his direct lexicographical offspring aims to remind words that they have a funny bone, a quirky sense of the absurd, a zest for life.
Its
Twitter
feed plays its part—sometimes throwing shade and sometimes just having fun.
2.
In 1980, camcorders and fax machines came on the market. There was rioting in Miami. And John Lennon was shot. It was also the year that air guitar and hijab officially entered American print.
3.
Merriam-Webster is a good place to bump into words you don’t know, or to meet stranger-words you’ve heard about but haven’t yet met—like zhuzh, nothingburger, technoference.
But I like to look up words I do know for context and to spark ideas.
For that, nothing beats the original Webster’s 1913. Definitions for words don’t read like they come from a pharmaceutical company’s prescription warning label. Instead, they come from philosophers and writers like John Locke, Tennyson, Shakespeare (Webster’s 1913 calls him by his street name, “Shak”).
Check out this sweet classic.
4.
The New York Times invites you to correct grammatical errors that ran in recent articles. This quiz is a good way to sharpen your technical writing skills.
Also, it’s fun to correct other people’s mistakes—especially when those other people write for the New York Times.
5.
“I went from being a bad
writer to a good writer after taking a one-day course in ‘business writing,’” writes Dilbert creator Scott Adams. Then he gives the six main things he picked up.
It’s an old post—11 years!—that nonetheless offers some solid, basic reminders that simple tweaks can help you write with more joy and clarity.
AS SLOW AS
POSSIBLE (ASAP)
6.
I've been talking about the benefits of long-form storytelling for a while. And lately, I've noticed a bunch of new examples crop up. And a persistent wind fueling the sails.
Things happen "gradually, and then suddenly," as Hemingway once wrote. That's the long-form content trend. Right now.
MARKETING
7.
You've always heard that department stores invented the price tag, right? That’s wrong, it turns out.
Side note: I want a team jersey from Haggle School.
8.
For all the stories of gutted newsrooms and struggling newspapers, there’s still an awful lot of innovation coming out of journalism.
Which means we marketers can get a lot of inspiration from newsrooms.
9.
I contributed to this Back to
the Future-themed
guide from DivvyHQ that offers insights and tips for content strategy, planning, and measurement.
My contribution is tactical: I share why it’s important to stay elbow-deep in
creating your own stuff for both marketing and leadership reasons. (And why I wish I’d started sooner.)
Get the guide here. (You’ll need to trade your email address for it, but it’s worth it.)
10.
I don’t know whether to categorize this story as Marketing (for its
innovative delivery) or Work-Life (for balance), but I love the snarky innovation of Disconnect, a brand-new digital magazine of commentary, fiction, and poetry that you can read only when you’re offline.
Seriously. Try it. (I tried to fake it out, too.)
Yeah, it’s manipulative, but no more so than distraction-free writing tools or apps that shut off your
Internet connection for periods of time so you can focus and get stuff done.
In this case, the publishers want you to focus on the literal
Disconnect.
WORK | LIFE
11.
Computer Silence
Are you Team Quiet or Team Music? I need complete silence to work (if people are breathing nearby, I ask them to stop). But if you like music or background noise to get into the flow, check out
Focus At Will, which offers what they call “scientifically optimized music” to help you
focus. (Whatever that means.)
Another option is the gentle hums and murmurs of
Coffitivity, which transports you to the center of bustle without having to actually, you know, put on something inconvenient like pants.
FINALLY
12.
I saw this story a few weeks ago, and I keep forgetting to tell you about it.
Sioux Falls romance writer Amy Daws found the cure for writer’s block in her local tire shop named Tires Tires Tires.
So much of this story sounds like a joke, but it’s not. It's just perfect.
After bringing her car in for service and surprisingly getting a bunch of writing done, Amy started finding excuses to write there again.
Eventually, Tires Tires Tires management gave her a lifetime pass and named her their Writer in Residence. (“Responsibilities accompanying this honor include offering her immediate help to determine if T3 should continue to offer the Summit Blend as one of our
coffee varieties.”)
Best of all, Tires Tires Tires celebrated when her book was finished:
13.
I started today talking about granddads. Let’s end there, too:
EVENTS
April 30-May 2: Marketing Nation (Marketo), San Francisco (Use code
Handley300 for $300 off.)
...& plan ahead!
Nov 13-16: The World Famous
MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum is coming to San Francisco! And because friends don’t let friends pay full price, code
ANNLOVESME
gets you $200 off. (And a high-five in person.)
Hugs for reading!
Ann
