My friend Stenzwi uses some strange interpretations of some seemingly harmless terms and phenomena. Not that I like him less for this quality of his but it’s hard to believe that somebody would actually scratch his head (with very few hair remaining on it) to come up with something that’ll add up to nothing at all. I’ll give you some examples to start with. Definition, for instance, is one of his forte. He has often told me that he plans to write a dictionary all by himself in the near future.
“And how do you plan to complete it?”
“Why would a dictionary be complete?”
“Aren’t they, generally?”
“Never. I’ll request you to become a member of the library of Stamphor and browse through some of the dictionaries there. You’ll see all of them are incomplete. Even if you find a term you’ve been looking for you’ll see that the definition given is insufficient.”
“I’m sure you’re planning to suffice them.”
“I’m going to start a revolution that would be carried forward through generations. A revolution to not just keep on adding on the number of words present in a dictionary but enrich the definition of those already present. I’ll call it “The Dictionary Revolution“.
Well, I had to go through a lengthy process of listening what his plans were and how he planned to execute them, followed by reading through a scrapbook he’s been collecting words. This is how one of the pages in his scrapbook looked -
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“A dictionary is always infinite.” he told me at last. To which I replied – “Paper ain’t”.
And immediately, I felt sorry. Was I insulting him somehow? He was my friend after all.
“Paper is complicated,” he replied “I haven’t found a perfect definition for it yet.”
They Have a Word for It, includes a sampling of words from around the world that defy translation. One of the words in the book is the Japanese, aware, which is the cultivation of a kind of awareness of “the bittersweet aesthetic emotion that can arise from contemplation” of the inevitable destruction of fragile beauty such as a cherry blossom floating to the ground. The definitions of bridge and sleep here reminded me of it.
My friend might just be glad to find some like-minded people around.
Smile.
Many like-minded people, I would think. I have found myself getting irritated at definitions lately–they seem incomplete, ineffective, irritating, inadequate–and it worried me a little, because it’s not good for someone who traffics in words to find them inadequate. I’m slowly coming to the conclusion it’s not so much the definitions themselves, as our need for a static definition of everything. It’s like the people in the Bible who insisted on a king, even when told by the one who would know that they’d regret it in the end.
I like the idea of a poetically-minded wiki-dictionary. Isn’t it amazing that we live in a time when this could actually happen.