INVITATION TO READ

 

Writers love words. 

I collect words and keep a Thesaurus by my side as I write. My favorite English major joke, "What's another name for a Thesaurus?" makes me laugh every time I think of it.

I read the dictionary from A to Z growing up, but I've never wondered how the words in a dictionary are selected. Then I read Pip Williams' historical fiction, The Dictionary of Lost Words, which chronicles the creation of the first Oxford English Dictionary and the people who collected the words that fill the dictionary's volumes.

I was intrigued by the story. Not only does Williams describe the lives of the people who curated the words to be defined, but she included significant historical events that had an effect on the choices for the dictionary. During the accumulation of words for the dictionary which began in 1884 and continued through the publication of the complete set of 10 volumes in 1933, monumental events such as World War I, the suffragette movement, and the Great Depression occurred. A group of men determined the main word choices and definitions based on the number of literary references that could be found. The men in charge often neglected women's words and common marketplace vernacular that were not considered substantiated enough to be included in the dictionary. Even a dictionary has a point of view. The main character Esme collects words that drop out of consideration and creates a dictionary of her lost words.

"Wonderful Words Used Rarely," a page from a letterpress book
 about language by Martha Slavin
(words include adumbrate, arcanum, eidetic,
irenic, muliebrity, perseverate, ratiocination)

A good friend invited Bill and me to the Authors Luncheon in San Francisco at the Palace Hotel organized by the National Kidney Foundation, which gave us the opportunity to listen to a diverse group of writers with new books. We also had a chance to help efforts to support people with kidney disease. We learned from one recipient of a kidney transplant that her grandmother had died of kidney disease. Although dialysis was available at the time, the grandmother was excluded from that treatment because she was Black.

We live in a world of layers, good and bad mixed together. Just as in the Dictionary of Lost Words where women's and common folks' languages were ignored, we need to remember the exclusion of people of color or ethnicity from opportunities that we often take for granted because we are White.

We joined other book lovers as we sat in the beautiful ballroom of the Palace Hotel, one of the few major buildings that survived the 1906 earthquake only to be destroyed by the subsequent fire. It was rebuilt in 1909 and then renovated in 1989. But the reminders of that first Gilded Age still abound in the sparkling chandeliers, the ornate ceiling decorations, and the marble columns lining the grand spaces.

We listened to Billy Collins, Michael Connelly, Jennifer Egan, Margaret Sexton Wilkerson, and Siddhartha Mukherjee as they discussed why they wrote their new books. Wilkerson's book, On the Rooftop, uses the 1950s Fillmore District in San Francisco as a backdrop for her story about three sisters as the Fillmore becomes gentrified and the community around them begins to dissolve.

Other good reads for the holidays:

Siddhartha Mukherjee:  The Song of the Cell

Billy Collins: Musical Tables

Michael Connelly: Desert Star

Jennifer Egan: The Candy House

Read about the history of the Palace Hotel here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_Hotel,_San_Francisco

To learn more about the National Kidney Foundation:

https://www.kidney.org

Check out the development of the Oxford English Dictionary here:

https://www.britannica.com/biography/James-Murray

Read about the gentrification of the Fillmore District:

https://www.kqed.org/news/11825401/how-urban-renewal-decimated-the-fillmore-district-and-took-jazz-with-it