THE SECRET LIVES OF WORDS
By Paul West 206 pp. Harcourt, Inc. New York
ISBN 0-15-100466-8 $24 Hardcover
A list of words, together with their meanings, can be a dictionary or a
thesaurus. It can be a lexicon, a glossary, an index, a bestiary, an
abcederian or a college crib. Or as in this work, in the hands of a writer
known widely as one of the master stylists now writing, it can be an
inspired piece of invention and surprise.
All words have a 'secret life' of sorts. At least this is true of those
which have been with us over the centuries. In this respect I rush to
distance myself from the language of the internet which, it seems to me,
has been constructed by a haphazard coterie of illiterates, insensitive to
any cadence or pleasures to the ear.
The words which most people use in conversation and in writing have their
origins in the elusive past and have been shuffled from one language to
another (and sometimes back again) to the effect that serious research
-and often inspired intuition - must take place to trace the twisting path
from original meaning to present usage. And most people don't give a rat's
ass whether or not a word they have chosen had a completely different
meaning millennia past.
But there are some people who do care - at least to the extent of being
curious about it. If you care just a little about words, this book will
catch and hold your interest and, if you are that sort of person, it will
provide you with a year or two of dining-out conversation.
West is an untiring researcher. His novels, such as The Women of
Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper and Lord Byron's Doctor are woven and
enmeshed in and about exhaustive research. And he also has an inventive,
curious mind. These attributes, together with wit, have joined to create a
book which has the happy facility of entertaining as it informs, and of
exciting as it entertains.
You get a hint of what is to come when you see that the epigram which
heads the Preface is like a word-play phrase from Nabokov: "The etymology
may sometimes be dubious, but the dubiology is alway etymous." This is
absolutely true, but it is also unexpected..
The Preface keys the work. West states, "My own approach to words, indeed
to their iceberg nature, has grown from delighted mystification to
near-voluptuous savoring of the illicit, almost as if, in a bright and
pragmatic context, something criminal were brewing: a touch of gangsterism
amid the rectitudes. Tracking and plumbing words, I confess I watched
certain commanding entities or concepts come forth, a prancing troupe from
the heart of hardbound definition; inflations, explosions, balloonings,
inexplicable switches, the kind of misrule that Sir John Falstaff
personifies, and all in the midst of a medium prized for its rigid
accuracy."
Perhaps I have put too heavy an emphasis on the researcher and the
dullness that word implies. These are hardly the words of a man sitting
with his Liddell and Scott at hand and a pad of paper in front of him.
These are the words of an adventurer.
And those of an honest man, for he goes on: "To the cry, Who do you think
you are?, which we have all heard in the heat of someone's indignation, I
tend not to answer, hoping to be who I seem to be. Who I would like to be,
if not a novelist (or a composer of symphonies), is the faultless
etymologist who, when asked, Why do we call a fillet of steak a fillet? or
What's the story of asbestos? can say, I'll tell you."
So then, here we come to the heart. An idiosyncratic list of four hundred
words with definitions that are little essays in themselves - loving,
articulate, informative, opinionated. Words like nun and glitch and Coney
Island Whitefish and leotard. Chosen, it would appear at random, like
throwing a dart at a sheet of newspaper. Many surprises, such as the word,
lasagna, which has it roots (if that is the appropriate term, but I can't
think of another) in the Athenian Greek word for chamber pot.
But you have to have more than arbitrary snippets to get the true feeling
for the kind of thing you will find here. So I'll quote one in it's
entirety - an appropriate one, I think. The word Ink. "When the ancient
Greeks painted, they sealed colors in with heat, which burned the colored
wax into place. Encauston, they named the result of this process. In
Latin, encauston became the name for the purple ink that emperors used to
use when signing their names, and then encauston became enque. So to our
enke or inke. The Greek process, its verb eqkalein (en-, in, plus kaiein,
burn) survives to this day as encaustic. Purple receded over the centuries
and ink now refers to any dark writing fluid. If you used purple ink and
were not entitled to it, the penalties were savage."
The stylist appears in the last word of that sentence. Not severe or harsh
as it would be in the hands of just any writer, but savage, which burns it
into our brains.
Paul West has written 20 works of fiction and 12 of non-fiction and is one
of the finest writers working today. He has received many awards and was
named Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Government.
It's a book to treasure. * * *