Nov

5

Book ‘Em: Words, Words, Words.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

November 5, 2007 |

He may best be known for his book Wonder Boys, which was adapted into a film with Michael Douglas as a shambling wreck of a college professor, or his 2000 novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay which won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize, but Michael Chabon is a prolific and wide-ranging author. Most recently he’s published a short adventure novel called Gentlemen of the Road. Set about a thousand years ago it’s about two Jewish horse thieves and mercenaries who travel through the Jewish kingdom of the Khazars. The book was originally serialized in The New York Times Magazine, but has now been published as a single volume.

While the book sounds both fun and fascinating, what was equally fascinating was listening to Chabon talk to NPR’s Robert Siegel about the book and the wide-ranging vocabulary writing about such a remote and, for most of us, alien culture requires. Chabon makes several striking, pithy remarks about the English language, among them:

“My sense of the English language is of this immense treasury just packed with words from every era, every land, from the entire history of the human race…”

“Sometimes there’s a word that’s so great that I’ve gotta use it”

“When I learn the history of a word…I have a sense of handling some kind of very ancient material.”

“It bothers me to think that there are all these words lying around that people aren’t using.”

Like Chabon I’ve always been fascinated by words and their origins. I love dictionaries. I love flipping through the Oxford English Dictionary to look up the origins of words that are both familiar and obscure. Some of my favorite obscure words are xeric (a fancy way of saying “dry”), aspine (snake-like, or like an asp), and telmatology (the study of peat bogs).

While I recommend Chabon’s book (you can read Chapter 1 and listen to Chabon read from it at NPR or in the New York Times) I also recommend that, some time this week, you pick a favorite obscure word of your own and use it. Supplementing your vocabulary will augment your mind. And words are a terrible thing to waste.


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