A few years ago, a friend of mine was compelled to downsize as she moved from her cottage and asked if I would relieve her of a large dictionary and its slope-topped table. I said I would pick it up and did so in a matter of a few days. I was thankful; she was thankful.

It is a Random House Unabridged Dictionary, 1966, with many reprint dates over the years. It measures 9 ½ inches by 12 and is 3 ½ inches thick. Too thick to grasp on the run. Not the OED, but it is somewhat more serious than my Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 1963, dog-eared, duct taped, with most of the semi-circle letter tabs missing. It has been a trusted companion during my writing life.

You may wonder, why in god’s name is he worried about this physical manifestation of English vocabulary? Yes, I can and often do tap letters into my iPhone or desktop with generally satisfactory results. With my dictionary however, and as sacrilege as it may be, I mark words I know I’ll look up again. Yes, I do that. Like AI robotic companions, it is comforting to have a conversation with an attractive dictionary!

Words have many disguises and often change color. (I explored the color of language in the blog “Our Age of Irony,” 21 April 2025.) Just think of all the terms and phrases we use regarding computers which had a previous use: dashboard, mouse, cloud, etc. Or have been created: drop-down menu, pixel, thumb-drive, and so on. I’m sure you, more ‘native’ to computering than I, can list dozens more. Such re-purposing can be based on a literal description—‘mouse’ has a long tail, while ‘cloud’ seems more metaphorical.

Connotation is the idea that a word can mean something beyond the denotation or ‘dictionary definition,’ if you like. It is based on personal or cultural associations with the word. For a classic example, there are the different suggestions of “house” and “home.” Connotation is used in many languages to add depth or richness to expression.

Fashionable words often emphasize a new or at least, different connotation. Remember the age of “awesome?” Everything seemed to be so described. The word of our times seems to be “unprecedented.” I suppose this word will someday fade from ubiquitous use by our news commentators. Let’s hope the actions the word describes will fade quickly. Trust in essentially neutral words is predicated on context. It amazes me how one partisan group can hostage words of a rival group and can use them to mean the opposite: patriotism (patriot) for instance.

Foreign words, that is words from languages other than English, are constantly introduced and absorbed, changing and enriching English. Anyone interested in words and language should read The Mother Tongue (Bill Bryson) or The Story of English (Robert McCrum, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil).

Sporadically for years, I have jotted lists of words that I have found of interest: sometimes purely for their sound, for their meaning, for their complexity of connotation, or for some personal relevance. To illustrate this, years ago I wrote the following:

Triage

Arcane words demand a dictionary,
Googled or thumbed,
and detached from use, remain
obdurate, a peeve.
Practical words are married
to daily definition.

Scribbled in margins:
svelte,
anodyne,
skosh,
erstwhile,
roshambo,
bikkhu.
We love their reveille,
their surprise twist of mind.

Vowels are the conscience of phonics,
the mother rules we obey;
while workaday consonants
run through the poem
like blood, like pulsing current.
Silent letters are the espionage
of ear, are of mole logic, conundrums.

Days are spent putting vocabularies
in order, pronouncing them mouth to mouth
like resuscitating a love interest—
not the word-forlorn saved by the autofill
of forgiveness, but tripped by typos,
caesuras, by how
one word avoids or befriends another.

(originally in The Pennsylvania Literary Review)

There are some words/phrases that I avoid using in my writing such as sui generous, paradigm, soul, pulchritude, etc. Why do I dislike innocent, indifferent, invertebrate words aware that words themselves are harmless symbols for expressive ideas, emotions, observations, etc.? Simply by personal connotation, personal prejudice: some words are cliché, some snotty, some anathema to my sensibility, some ‘poetic’ or of sentimental connotation, and some denote notions I dismiss as expressing untenable concepts.

Periodically, my wife and I cull our stacks of books and donate them to the local public library sale, but we have been informed that they will not take magazines, encyclopedias, text books or public school discards. Dictionaries are accepted if current, unmarked, (and without missing words?)

The door-stop dictionary I now possess at nearly twelve pounds, will not be condemned to that passive duty, but from time to time I will provide reprieve and enlist its labor for a few minutes if only for the relief of reading honest-to-god print. Acquisition of vocabulary requires a modicum of effort, of leafing through this list of words. This dictionary has enough weight for the realization that neologisms knock for admittance, mole-words sabotage common usage, some words languish with their diacritical marks, that words describe, explain, comfort, and connect readers of and to this world.

Fred Wilbur has written in varied genres including essays and blogs, historical research, newspaper columns, magazine articles, book reviews, and book introductions. He has also published three volumes of poetry, and three how-to woodcarving instruction books. His poetry collections are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out, Conjugation of Perhaps, and The Heft of Promise (Pine Row Press, 2025). The Nelson County Garden Club: The First Fifty Years, 1935-1985 was underwritten by the Nelson County Historical Society (2023).