I had a friend whose job for many years was putting the dictionary in different orders. It was less about sensitizing the insensate and more about remapping a scattered topography; there was no intention of prescribing the use and value of any word involved. She might as well have crossed out the numbers on a deck of cards and written in new ones. Of course, the cards would have borne the mark of interference—in this case, it was signalled by the unfamiliar covers of the books which were bound, shipped, bought, and sold, with the friend’s namemodesttowards the bottom of the inside flap.
Despite modesty there was widespread demand for the dictionaries, bolstered by their commercial origins, eleven editions released in as many years by Merriam Webster. It would not have been uncommon to see copies out on the bus—eminently readable for reasons hard to identify but rarely sparking curiosity—now in the aftermath, I offer my theorywhich is that there had long been a cravingfor change without conversiondeep displacement unlockedwithin the ordinary,more life. We also enjoyedthe degree to which the language and its coursing latencies had been genuinely fortifiedin the sheen of restructuring—satisfying, particularly skimmingnoun to noun, as in: broadcast vestige patinabenday
With the publication of each edition there was an outpouring of new word creation, proposals, answersI supposeto that untrammeled fare which preceded the dictionary, all dilicatnes and kine.cows, obsolete pluralAlsothe emergence of an alternate mnemonic: if you want the definition of prism, find the page that begins with attention.I was drivingdowntown that day to meet her,she wasretired from the dictionary business now doing what everyone did, learning film photography, drifting betweenbarista jobs at different local coffee shops. Before I left I thumbed through the first edition she’d ever configured,my guilty favoritein the thrall of nostalgia,although of course there were wonderful moments equally possible among all of them.I searchedfor what I remembered as a slippage of near-legible messaging—
confirm at entry while drift onramp lopsided siècle
“a ramp by which one enters a limited-access highway,”I registeredfrom the tangle of unbolded text, and of coursehalf the page speculated on the applications of at—
Getting coffee I never asked about the dictionaries althoughwe were careful to trace the vectorsof our lives’ present momentum;she had been in California for several months before this, as she put it, hanging outwith the newborn of her other friends who I knew only distantlyfirst we walked down thesidewalk in the bathwater windwarm enough on the cusp of spring that clothing storeswere placing racks of prom dresses on the pavement in our path;she felt she was prepared for submersion, engagement, fixation,asked her what to order having shamefully lied aboutbeinga coffee drinkerthen we were off to the second place wherewe both ordered again.
That first drink in my estimation cleaved more to what I might have chosen for myself if I’d had the credentials. I very well expected to take other friends there, or to orderthe same at other places, pretending atmany mornings of careful consideration,the full menu sampled,before finally achieving the preferred order,my personal icon, perhaps a step towards selfhood. The second drink, though, was more challenging. I didn’t have the means to describe itas she would have—find complexity under sawhorse, I believe—its ladenness almost backward-reachinginto winter whenher photographs involved large paintingsin the snow, herself and the painterenmeshed in argument.
I didn’t have as many arguments with heras I should havewhen arguments were possible, each of usin a similar enough domain.Instead—it was an odd thing to dowe weren’t closely in touch at the time—I wrote about her work as though writing aboutthe safest stranger,naming the dictionariesas units for accessing the blood of possibility,a landscape of ambivalent values, infinitely interchangeable;and what she had done was evince not justthe possibility but the ambivalenceof language, futureswith, thenthe present moment
obligingconstrained by physical, moral, or legal force or by the exigencies of circumstance
jugularof the lower throat or the part of the neck just above the breast of a bird
as an added voice to the discourse.
Mia George