In traditional ranch and farm homes as I first knew them, every dining table usually had a set of reference books because people wanted their children to “know things” and would look up facts when discussion arose during meals. This habit may have begun during the war when so many men were overseas and their families tried to follow what was happening and where the "boys" were. It's a good habit for writers.
Appended is a list of the desk books I own that I don’t keep on the desk, but nevertheless . . . You’ll notice that they are mostly old books, deaccessioned by high school libraries or gifts from my mother to my father, who was considered highly skilled at writing — meaning conforming to the best English form of the time — because he had an MA from Oregon State College before it was a university, still focused on ag. His master’s thesis was about the economics of potatoes which his birth family had raised in Manitoba. We thought this was all very educated. It was a time when everyone subscribed to the Reader's Digest and did the vocabulary exercises.
I want to lift up two books:
A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage by Bergen Evans and Cornelia Evans (1957)
Comfortable Words by Bergen Evans (1957 thru 1961)
1957 to 1961 were my undergrad years at Northwestern University. When I went there, Bergen Evans was the only person I knew because he had a TV program about this subject of word origins and usage. He taught the massive foundational English lit class meant for those students who had “comped out” of taking the nearly remedial first year English class. Somewhere in the auditorium where the class was held sat Ivan Doig who grew up where I live now. He was in the same scholarship program but he was poorer than me and had to work some of it off by waiting tables. His field was History so we didn’t share any other classes — I was in Speech, pursuing theatre.
Shameless operator that I am, in that auditorium I claimed the middle of the third row and made it a point to react to everything Evans said. I was using a high school trick of operant conditioning in which we taught Mr. Knudson, algebra teacher, to pull on his left ear. Every time he did it, we made big smiles and nods until he was unconsciously doing it all the time. He never figured it out.
Evans began to recognize me and check when he made a good point to see if I got it. He was very funny and quick, so when someone put a goldfish in the pitcher of ice water he kept by his podium, he made a quip in Greek. I didn’t get it, but others did.
I wrote what I thought was a very deep poem which was only about three lines. The first one was “Light is caste conscious.” Now I see that what I was trying to address was the existential and pervasive hierarchy of all phenomena. It was about trying to figure how good I was at this stuff since my parents expected me to be brilliant. I couldn’t have said it at the time. Evans didn’t make fun of me and he helped me get into a writing class, where I was ridiculed. I was the only woman.
Evans’ TV program asked for people to send in questions for him to answer so my mother, who loved the program, sent in a question about the use of the word “bully” as in both “bully for you” and bullying people, which seems contradictory. I forget what he said, but the program sent her a complimentary set of encyclopedias.
All this mattered to her because she had finished college so she could teach to put me through college and one of her challenges had been vocabulary and usage. This preoccupation used to be widespread among people who were first-generation college attenders or immigrants. My father had an edge because his father had been educated in Scotland where standards were high and his mother had taught English and knew by heart at least a hundred famous English poems.
My edge came from reading all the time. I still do that but these books listed below are not so helpful anymore. Now I need Google to fathom online jargon, urban slang, computer techie talk, government alphabet soup, and porn metaphors. Also, medical terminology, geological terms, and — of course — the big German words one learns in seminary but rarely uses. No need for a dictionary of cussing since it is so repetitious and even kids are in the habit of saying fuck as an intensifier.
It was a shock to all our systems to realize, as the French and Algerian philosophers kept explaining, that every word had a penumbra of associations. Peter Matthiessen pointed out to a seminar I attended that though bison have purple mouths, one should not compare them to chow dogs whose mouths are also purple, because impressive as a chow can be, it is not so majestic as a bison. Even mentioning a pet dog can divert the mind from the concept one is promoting as metaphor, which should be of equal weight unless you’re trying to change the generally accepted impression.
This new awareness enters into the territory of poetry. That’s a different set of books to list another time. But I’m fond of this dusty old set as one of my writing roots. They have served me well.
A Desk Book of Idioms and Idiomatic Phrases in English Speech and Literature by Frank H. Vizetelly and Leander J. de Bekker (1923)
Words and What They Do to You: Beginning Lessons in General Semantics for Junior and Senior High School by Catherine Minteer (1953)
English Phonetics: a Revised Version of the Sounds of Spoken English by Walter Ripman (1939)
Why We Say: A Guidebook to Current Idioms and Expressions — and Where They Came From by Robert L. Morgan (1953)
Word Origins and their Romantic Stories by Wilfred Funk (1950)
The Roots of English: a Reader’s Handbook of Word Origins by Robert Claiborne (1989)
The Word Finder by J.I. Rodale 1947)
The New Pocket Roget’s Thesaurus in Dictionary Form edited by Norman Lewis (1961)
The Shorter Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations by John Bartlett. (This version 1964)
Phrase and Word Origins: A Study of Familiar Expressions by Alfred H. Holt (1936)
The Word Bank by Sophie Basescu (1949)
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