MY LIST O’ LEXICONS

by James Lincoln Warren

Some people shoot heroin, some play the ponies, some drink caffeinated beverages, and others rent DVDs. Me, I’m a dictionary junkie. I don’t know how many dictionaries I own. I honestly don’t. But for a writer, having dictionaries hardly qualifies as a vice. Of the many I own, I can think of only a couple I don’t routinely consult.

Along with my Bible, The Oxford English Dictionary, easily the greatest work of scholarship in all of history, here are some within easy reach on my bookshelves:

• Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (a now out-of-print CD-ROM I keep by my computer from Cambridge University Press, containing facsimile and transcribed versions of the 1st (1753) and 4th (1773) editions)
• Partridge’s A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (mostly British and Commonwealth, some American, slang)
• Wood’s The Complete Rhyming Dictionary (revised by Bogus—I kid you not)
• Hornblower and Spawforth’s The Oxford Classical Dictionary (more of a single volume encyclopædia on Greek and Roman history and culture than a quick-reference dictionary)
• Smith’s Smaller Classical Dictionary (more of a quick-reference dictionary of Greek and Roman names than a single-volume encyclopædia, but don’t let the word “Smaller” in the title mislead you into thinking it’s not comprehensive)
• Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon (in both the complete and abridged editions—the latter is intended for students studying Attic and Biblical Greek, while the former is a comprehensive survey of ancient Greek intended for use by classical scholars)
• Glare’s Oxford Latin Dictionary (this massive volume contains every single Latin word recorded from classical times)
• Traupman’s The New College Latin & English Dictionary (published by Bantam in paperback, this book has a valuable English-to-Latin section as well and lists over 70,000 words)
• Chapman’s New Dictionary of American Slang (the standard dictionary of American slang, but pretty dated these days)
• Shaw and Nicholson’s The Dictionary of Ancient Egypt (prepared in association with the British Museum)
• Attwater’s The Avenel Dictionary of Saints (also available in paperback as The Penguin Dictionary of Saints, but I have the old hardcover—this is essentially a distillation of a famous 18th century book, Alban Butler’s The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs and Other Principal Saints, first published in three volumes between 1756 and 1759)
• Kojima and Crane’s A Dictionary of Japanese Culture (published by The Japan Times, lists mostly “high” culture—you won’t find any entries on manga or kawaii, although there is an entry on pachinko)
• Dainith and Nelson’s The Penguin Dictionary of Mathematics
• Various bilingual dictionaries (Larousse for French, Klett for German, the Moscow Russian Language Press for Russian, Bantam paperbacks for Italian and Spanish)
• Three English style dictionaries (Fowler, Partridge, and Amis)
• Kemp’s The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea
• Hooper and Whyld’s The Oxford Companion to Chess
• Adams’ Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon (utterly delightful)
• A few that alphabetically list English (as in England) and Scots idioms translated into American idioms
• Three reverse dictionaries, i.e., the words are arranged by subject, rather than alphabetically
• Fleming, Honour, and Pevsner’s The Penguin Dictionary of Architecture (a fabulous resource, very useful for finding the right term when one is describing buildings)
• At least seven thesauri (thesauruses? The word “thesaurus” literally means “treasury”; its lexicographical meaning of a dictionary of synonyms was coined by Roget in the 19th century)

All of the books above, I think, would be of interest to anybody who likes to read. But then there are some strange ones that I think would probably bore most folks out of their skulls, but which I find fascinating, since they appeal to the diction cop in me:

• R. L. Trask’s A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics
• Dupriez and Hall’s A Dictionary of Literary Devices (essentially a dictionary of rhetoric, written originally in French by Dupriez, then translated and adapted by Hall into English)
• Pullum and Ladusaw’s Phonetic Symbol Guide (a catalog of symbols, many of which are obsolete, used in linguistics to indicate phonemes—I admit this one’s more than a little weird, but what fun!)

. . . and a few others hidden on shelves obstructed by stacks of DVDs and CDs and other books.

And there are two more that I want.

The first of these is Lighter’s Historical Dictionary of American Slang. This was a project begun by Random House in the mid 1990s. They published two volumes (Vol. I: A-G; Vol II: H-O, originally planned as H-R) and then abandoned it when the prospective third and final volume (originally conceived as S-Z) was delayed—it turned out to be too expensive for them to finish the job. The project was picked up by Oxford University Press in 2003, who decided to split the last volume into two parts, and have been promising to publish volumes III and IV now for several years—the last date I saw advertised was 2009, but that came and went without any books. Anyway, I’m waiting for them to come out before I take the plunge and get the set, but the two Random House volumes are easy to find used at very reasonable prices.

The second book I want is really a thesaurus, the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, already being referred to as the “HTOED”, the first historical thesaurus ever produced, a gold mine containing almost a million words, showing both first and last usages by date. It’s in two volumes. It’s wonderful. But it’s almost four hundred bucks. Maybe someday.

BLACKOUT

by Leigh Lundin

Among many mystery writers, realism is important. Stories have been written involving events going awry when authors try to simulate similitude. Wednesday, I entered the ranks of those writers, albeit unintentionally.

My contribution to research realism was to pass out on a restroom floor.

And– it wasn’t anything like I’d been led to expect from novels and movies.

The Story

I don’t know if it’s more embarrassing to claim I’d been drinking heavily or admit I hadn’t been drinking at all, that it was 2PM instead of 2AM. I think I’d feel better if I had a good excuse.

It’s 09:15, Friday morning, my third day in Florida Hospital South. Apparently, I’ll be here another 24 hours. Out in the hallway, I hear a repeating announcement, "Code blue, Main Building, code blue." I’m in 3-Morgan, not the main building.

Mostly, the good guys know what didn’t happen to me rather than what did– not a heart attack, probably not blood sugar, probably not CDIF, etc. A doctor says they never determine about 60% of cases. It might have been a food or additive allergy, perhaps food poisoning, dehydration, or my personal favorite, a vasovagal episode.

Syncope means loss of consciousness. It’s not fainting. Guys don’t faint. Guys also don’t swoon like delicate heroines in 19th century literature. Guys black out. Hey, if I’m going to helplessly collapse, one might as well be manly about it, so the word is ‘blackout’.

The Scene

I was finishing lunch with friends mentioned previously, Thrush, Steve, and Sharon. I excused myself to visit the restroom. I rapidly felt dizzy and overwhelmingly hot. (Temperature, I mean, as opposed to my famed hotness.) My skin itched and broke into sweat.

I managed to wash and swagger, er, stagger outside. I fell back on a long banquette the restaurant has outside the door, letting cool air conditioning wash over me. My friends were eating at the other end of the restaurant. Unable to walk, I used my cell phone to call them.

Steve arrived and helped me stand to enter the restroom again. I felt worse, sicker than before. Sight narrowed and grew dark. Cognition was fading, but I knew I had to get outside.

About blacking out, this is what I learned:

Habits and old training don’t let go. I forced myself to wash, slap-dash as it was, and tried to find the door. That may have been my last conscious directive. My ability to balance and navigate left me and so did my sense of what was going on.

I felt like I was lost in that small room. I couldn’t find the door, at least not immediately. I remember banging hard into walls at least twice. It was like I had a drive to get outside the restroom into cool air and lie down, but I wasn’t aware how fast I was deteriorating.

My field of vision appeared no wider than a foot or so, dark and distant. The scene looked like a monochromatic cubist painting, angles of grey, shades of black in blacking out. I remember finding the door and then…

… nothing.

Supporting Cast

I don’t remember this part: Steve waited outside. When I opened the door, he saw I’d turned a vivid red. He said, "Are you okay?" and watched me topple backwards, smacking my head on the floor. He fetched Thrush to help.

I was out only a minute or two and I remember my friends bending over me. They tried to get me to my feet and I was able to assist (I think), if only a little. They maneuvered me to the banquette and stretched me out.

Events seemed like snapshots and sound bites. With sweat running off me, the cool air gave relief.

Paramedics swarmed around me, amazingly efficient. One read off "Blood pressure 50 over zero."

Not sure, but I seem to remember someone, maybe Steve (or me?), ask, "Isn’t zero like… dead?" A paramedic explained the diastolic wasn’t actually nil, but too low to read.

The rest came as a series of surprises: surprise paramedics arrived, surprise they wanted to take me to the hospital, surprise the hospital wanted to keep me.

What I Learned

My fainting, er, blackout resembled no film or worded description I’ve come across. Likely it’s different for each person, perhaps for each syncopal episode. Some people say fainting was like a light switch: one moment they’re here, the next they wonder why they’re on the floor.

Disconcertingly, I have a feeling I wouldn’t recognize if another syncope spell swept over me. Symptoms seemed too general and I doubt the few active brain cells could piece together I’d been through this before.

Among other things I learned: friends are good to me, the hospital is good to me, and life is good even when it’s bad, so to speak.

Update

I’m home, thanks to Thrush and everyone else. Valentine was glad to see me in his cockatoo way. While I was gone, elves cleaned. That’s magic!

But, my internet and phone are out of service until, they tell me, Tuesday at noon. Now I have to find a wifi connection to upload this story.

If I’m unable to make updates or answer comments until Tuesday, don’t worry… it’s the internet knocked out, not me.

TOTALLY LOST

by John M. Floyd

Not long ago one of my writer friends told me she’d be glad when she finished working on her current novel so she could start reading again. “So you can what?” I asked. “So I can start reading again,” she said. “I never read fiction while I’m writing fiction — it distracts me.” She went on to explain that she never even watches movies or TV shows (except for the news) during a writing project, for the same reason. Other plotlines interfere with the one she’s working on at the moment.

I’m not sure, exactly, how that approach can work. It couldn’t work for me, because if I didn’t read or watch movies while I’m in the middle of a writing project . . . well, I guess I wouldn’t read or watch movies at all, because I’m always working on a story or a novel or both, and I plan to continue doing that for the foreseeable future. And how can you be a writer if you don’t read?

I actually believe that the fiction a writer reads and sees can help the process, anytime and all the time. This past week I was convinced of that yet again, when I was among the devoted (and yes, brainwashed) fans who tuned in for what might have been the most widely publicized TV series finale in recent years.

Lost in my thoughts

I must mention, here, that I don’t watch much television. I watch the screen a lot, because it’s hooked to my DVD player, but I don’t watch many TV broadcasts, except — as my friend said — for the news. And I have almost never tuned in for every single episode of a made-for-TV series. The ones I’ve most enjoyed I’ve either rented and seen on DVD (cable series like The Sopranos, Deadwood, and Rome) or watched only during part of their run (I started late on Hill Street Blues and I finally gave up after a few years of ER).

But Lost? I was hooked from the get-go. For six seasons, I either sat there goggle-eyed in real time or I recorded it and saw it later that same night. What was it about that show, I often asked myself, that made it so captivating?

The answer is simple. It’s the same thing — two things, actually — that makes any piece of fiction a success: a gripping story and interesting characters. Lost, whether you loved it or ignored it, had both.

The mysterious island

First, the plot. A group of travellers made up of different races and nationalities crash on an uncharted island and then find out that they were so far off course no one’s even looking for them in the right place. Rescue ain’t gonna happen. Worse, there’s another group hidden in the jungle who aren’t merely antisocial; they’re so unfriendly they show up now and then to kidnap people in the middle of the night. And even worse, there’s something really big out there in the dark beyond the campfire that likes to roar and snap trees in half and snack on unlucky airline pilots. Fans later named it the Locke-ness monster, a term you’ll understand only if you were a fan.

The storyline, even though it got a little zany at times, accomplished what it set out to do: entertain the viewers and keep them watching. Why did it work? Because the show’s writers understood suspense. There weren’t many slow moments. Remember the old saying that if the plot begins to drag, have someone come through the door with a gun? That happened a lot, in Lost. The doors were usually jungle clearings or mission-control hatches, but there were plenty of weapons involved, from Uzis to machetes to sticks of dynamite. In one case, even an H-bomb. (That one’s a long story.)

A cast of castaways

Next, the characters. It would be hard to imagine a more dysfunctional group: a fugitive on the run, a former lottery winner/mental patient, an Iraqi soldier who specialized in torture, a drug-addicted rock star, a doctor with dominating-father issues, a reluctant assassin married to his boss’s daughter, a pregnant lady who almost sold her baby and then backed out, a father and son estranged from each other, a woman with terminal cancer, a wheelchair-bound man who was tricked into giving his father a kidney, and so on. A psychiatrist would have a field day with any one of these folks, and on this show the whole group was loony. Besides that, they were constantly in conflict with each other as well as with their inner demons.

As incredible as it sounds, I as a viewer really grew to care about these people. One reason was that the creators of the series decided to regularly cut away from the current action to show, via flashbacks, each character’s backstory. It was a brilliant move, and resulted in — at least for the first two seasons — some of the best TV I’ve seen in years. When one of the regulars succeeded in some attempt, I cheered; when one got killed (voted off the island?) I mourned.

Later on, I’ll admit, things got a little rocky. I almost bailed out a few times in seasons three and five, when plot holes appeared that were big enough to fly an Oceanic L-1011 through. But I hung in there, despite all the time-travel mumbojumbo and the flashbacks and flash-forwards and flash-sideways (yes, that’s another term introduced by this series). I remained faithful until and throughout the two-and-a-half-hour finale the other night. And now it’s over. As a tired and sweaty Butch said to Sundance after robbing a Bolivian bank:

“No more jungle work.”

The finale aired on Sunday, May 23rd. I’m not sure what I expected — I’ve hated some final episodes of big series (Seinfeld, The X-Files, St. Elsewhere) and loved others (Cheers, Newhart, The Mary Tyler Moore Show) — but I wound up enjoying this one. And wonder of wonders, they found a way to actually tie everything together in a pretty satisfying ending. They even incorporated a tried-and-true “circular storyline” technique: the opening shot of the series was a close-up of the main character’s eye opening; the final shot was a close-up of his eye closing.

Now that it’s done, I won’t say I’m Lost, but I do feel that I will miss those characters, and the island, and even the diabolical smoke monster. Hey, the show had a lot of things going for it: romance, fantasy, suspense, science fiction, an Oahu North Shore setting, and fantastic music by Michael Giacchino. And, supposedly, the most expensive pilot episode in TV history.

One thing I am happy about, though.

Now I don’t have to remember to be home or to set the DVR every Tuesday night.

REFLECTIONS FROM THE LOOKING-GLASS

by Steven Steinbock

Rather than subjecting you to lexical leanings and morphological meanderings, I’m giving the dictionary a rest for the week. Instead, I here are few links, photos, and videos to share with you.

Signing in the Walden Books

Last month while I was at Malice Domestic, Parnell Hall took the opportunity to make a music video about the travails of an author.

Quick-eyed readers may spot me in the panel scene along with Parnell, Dan Stashower, and Bill Link. Incidentally, while Mary Higgins Clark was the Lifetime Achievement honoree, Parnee was the Guest of Honor.

Suitable for Hanging

Imagine my delight when I found that Margaret Maron had written a blog-column about meeting me. Here’s the piece. I still have Margaret’s lanyard-string somewhere. One of the nice things about performing magic is that people (like Dorothy Cannell’s husband, Julian) buy you drinks.

Bloody Books

Last weekend I was in Toronto for Bloody Words. Had a great time, and got to meet a lot of cool Canadian authors. At the banquet, my wife sat with the funny and charming Anthony Bidulka who was one of the readers for the Hammett Prize presentation. Just before the dinner, we posed for a couple of publicity shots under the direction of Iden Ford. Here’s a link to Jill Edmondson’s blog where she posted Iden’s photo of Anthony Bidulka reading a particularly shocking passage from her book while several of us look on. (That’s Jill sitting at Anthony’s feet, and that’s me and my wench – ahem, wife – standing behind Anthony.

Jabberwocky

I thought I’d leave you with something really bizarre. Someone named Jim Clark created this animation using a photograph of Lewis Carroll and a reading of “Jabberwocky.”

It’s a little creepy. The reading is nice, except for the extra consonant that the guy adds to the word frumious.

For a really good audiobook production of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (and I’ve listened to literally dozens of them), try Christopher Plummer’s reading for Harper Audio, available from Audible.com

HOT, HOT, HOT!

by Deborah Elliott-Upton

”I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.” – William Faulkner.

I’m sitting alone in my hairdresser’s reception area. A coffee machine is gurgling, a Coke machine is humming a bit too loud, but stops abruptly as the air conditioning kicks into high gear. From several rooms off the hallway I face, I hear soft murmurs followed by laughter. The sounds float around me like waves lapping upon the shore. The bits of conversation I can make out are comments on the weather (it’s hot!) to a new guy a stylist is dating (he’s hot!) or the situation in Congress (which always seems to be a hot button topic).

”A man from hell is not afraid of hot ashes.” – Dorothy Gilman

I pilfered through the stack of magazines and note the expected: hairstyle magazines with hairdo’s most of us wouldn’t choose, some great ones that most of us can’t choose and fashion mags of celebrities who make outrageous choices seem commonplace.

What I never expected to find was a copy of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. This one is a recent issue and had seen some serious use. Hooray for the person who placed this magazine into the mix. There are some of us who enjoy tickling our brains as much as tweaking our appearances.

”A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows.” – O. Henry

I’d recently heard former agent-now author and publisher, W. Terry Whalin, talk about how each year less and less of the population are reading anything past what they find on an Internet screen. That and empty libraries are scary propositions not just for writers and publishers, but our world.

What would life be like without books of paper? If the Kindle, Nook and iPad have their way, we may find out in the near future.

Most of my writing friends are either novelists or non-fiction book writers. Very few of us compose short stories on a regular basis. In fact, several people have informed me they don’t care for short stories. I personally don’t get it. Short stories are perfect choices for these times. Short attention spans are required for short stories. We don’t have to invest all that much time in reading a short story.

Yes, reading is a choice. It’s one I choose to take. I think readers are hot.

EVIL GENIUS?

by Rob Lopresti

I just read a review of a biography of Patricia Highsmith, the much-praised author of Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and other crime novels. Apparently, Joan Schenkar’s The Talented Miss Highsmith reports that she was not a very nice person.

According to the review Highsmith was a forger, a drinker, serially unfaithful, anti-Semitic, anti-Civil Rights movement, and anti-feminist. She was also nasty to fans and critics, had bad table manners, and one assumes, probably kicked puppies and pinched babies..

To which, one may reasonably reply: Who cares? She was a great writer, and isn’t that all that matters? People who make that argument often quote Faulkner: “The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much that he can’t get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies.”

Mebbe so, But the writer is also a person and the person has a duty not to be evil.

The interesting thing to me is that I have met a whole lot of people of great talent — mostly writers and musicians — and the number of nasty ones I have encountered I could count on one hand. Of course, maybe they were just pretending to be nice — but isn’t being nice to people who can’t do you any favors part of being a good guy?

The trope I often run across is that good artists (and we’ll use that word to cover writers, etc.) can be nice people, but great ones, the geniuses, are all so neurotic and/or self-centered that they can’t behave in polite company.

I wonder if anyone has done a study of that, assuming there is any way to objectively identify the geniuses. Pulitzer prize winners, or the like?

Mozart was a wacko. Tchaikovsky was suicidal. But what about Bach? I know he had tons of kids and money problems (not unrelated, perhaps) but was he crazy or evil? Not that I’ve heard.

Maybe these scandals about Highsmith should cheer us up. See? We write real literature! We have crazies too!

If you’ll excuse me, The Voices are telling me to go pet the cats.

This video of an interview with Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Stephen King was made by the folks at Borders a couple years ago. It was made to promote his 2008 collection of short stories, Just After Sunset, and features some of his thoughts on writing short stories.

STEPHEN KING ON JUST AFTER SUNSET

Stephen King interviewed by Borders Media

The specific story they discuss, “N”, has been produced as a series of “mobisodes”, i.e. “mobile episodes”: short films specifically intended to be downloaded and viewed on a mobile device such as an iPhone. You can see it (on your computer), along with a continuation of the above interview at Borders Media’s website here.