Lexicographers, No Drudges They Fawaz Turki, Arab News

Opinion, July 2003, www.aljazeerah.info

Lexicographers, No Drudges They

Fawaz Turki, Arab News

WASHINGTON, 27 July 2003 — Samuel Johnson, who should know, having almost single-handedly composed his 50,000-word “Dictionary of the English Language in 1747, defined a lexicographer as “a harmless drudge.”

He may be that, but the end result of a lexicographer’s assemblage of our verbal trends never fails to both entertain and enlighten. That is why I find the new Eleventh edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate dictionary, released in mid-July, priceless.

And what a semantic feast it is — a volume containing 225,000 definitions, crammed among them 10,000 new words, including ones from the new information age (geek, “n. an enthusiast or expert, especially in a technological field”) and the media world (spinmeister, n. a political aide responsible for ensuring that others interpret an event from a particular point of view”). And how gratifying to discover that many of the words invented by the subculture of my time have not been cycled out.

You can still “split” the party, “hassle” your editor, “pick up on” a “drift” in the conversation, and have “edge” to your personality, or “live on the edge” because you have chosen life “in the fast lane,” (Sadly to “groove” or to be “groovy” have been sent out to pasture because their relevance has faded.)

And so it goes, with words that began their vibrant life as rebellious outsiders, in the form of colloquialisms, but are now, in middle age, respectable, hardworking citizens.

To those of us, however, who were in the vanguard that coined them in the first place, in the zestful sixties, these creations lost their appeal the moment they were appropriated by the unwashed masses of the white middle class. After all, our intention in resorting to, or taking refuge in, slang was to escape the solemnity and straitjacket of established linguistic, i.e. cultural, values; to show that one is different; to display a spontaneous exuberance of spirit; and even to actually avoid being understood by others outside one’s milieu.

After finding their home in a dictionary, these colloquialisms often travel abroad to be embraced — given the forcefulness and popularity of American culture — by other languages. That’s how it goes.

And that’s how it was with Arabic at the ascendancy of the Islamic commonwealth of nations. Browse through this handsome lexicon and you’ll find words that describe the foods, tastes, habits and concepts exported by Arabs to Christendom, so much in common use today that English speakers forget their origin: Orange, lemon, sugar, syrup, sherbet, julep, mattress, sofa, muslin, satin, traffic, bazaar, check, tariff, magazine, risk, sloop, barge, cable and admiral.

From music have come: Lute, guitar and tambourine (the troubadours, who used these instruments to accompany their poetry and song vocals, came from Muslim Spain). And from Arab scientific terms we get: Algebra, zero, cipher, zenith and almanac.

And the lexicographers of the new edition of Merriam-Webster’s are astute enough to include intifada (“n. uprising, rebellion, spec: an armed uprising against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip”), though the birth date of the word is erroneously given as 1985, not 1987, when it was first used in that context; and to define jihad as “n. a personal struggle in devotion to Islam, spec. involving spiritual discipline.”

To the folks at Merriam-Webster’s, who have been at it since 1847, no one is left out — consider “comb-over,” for those hapless guys who think inventive styling can conceal their baldness, straightforwardly defined as “n. an arrangement of hair on a balding man in which hair from the side of the head is combed over the bald spot.”

They follow in the hallowed tradition of Hellenistic Greece, that had dictionaries of all sorts, and China, that had the “shuo wen” as early as 150 BC, as well as of the Arabs, who had developed their own science of lexicography, expounded in “Fiah al-Lughah,” in the 10th century.

And, oh yes, Palestine, as a modern political entity, “now approx. coextensive with Israel and the West Bank,” is not there. But heck, road map, defined as “n. a detailed plan to guide progress toward a goal,” is.

This dictionary is (what’s the word here?) hip — “adj. having or showing awareness of or involvement in the newest developments or styles, e.g. ‘hip musicians’”

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).