Sunday, October the 12th, 2014
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“The dictionary ends sooner than the soul.”—Frederic Myers, letter to Arthur Sidgwick, 14 July 1867.
When we reach the end of the dictionary, there are no more words. We have exhausted them. We are left, then, with three choices.
We may lapse into silence. This is a strategy much favoured by anchorites and hermits and some saints and saintly persons. I have, myself, been described as a Diogenesian recluse, and not without good reason.
We may resort to barbaric grunting. This seems to be a popular choice among many of the shuffling scowling denizens of my bailiwick. Whenever I go sashaying forth—for even a recluse must sashay forth from time to time—I hear more grunts than words. But where once I thumbed my nose in patrician contempt at those grunters, now I understand that they have been reduced to their barbarism because they have used up all the words in the dictionary, from A to Z. They reached the end.
We may invent new words. We may coin new sounds. Glogscheen, snup, parapapahooft, swarfoogie. Some might say we are thus babbling nonsense. Others would counter that our nonce-words are divinely inspired, that we are “speaking in tongues”. Once towards the end of the last century, I sat in a hall in a meeting of the religiously devout, several of whose members loomed over me and so spoke in tongues, to cure me of my woes. Those woes are past, and I may doubt that incoherent babbling was the cause of their passing, but can I ever be sure?
There is a fourth choice. When we reach the end of the dictionary, we turn back to the beginning, where each and every word awaits us anew.