Travels in Philadelphia/Wild Words We Have Known
WILD WORDS WE HAVE KNOWN
About noon on Saturday the city heaves a sigh of relief. Indeed, it begins a little earlier than that. About eleven-forty even the most faithful stenographer begins to woolgather. Letters dictated in that last half hour are likely to be addressed "Mrs. Henrietta Jenkins, Esq.," or "Miss John Jones." The patient paying teller has to count over his notes three times to be sure of not giving a five instead of a one. The glorious demoralization spreads from desk to desk. No matter who we are or how hard we have worked, it is Saturday noon, and for a few hours we are going to forget the war and spend our pocketful of carefree fresh-minted minutes. As Tom Daly, the poet laureate of Philadelphia, puts it—
"Whenever it's a Saturday and all my work is through,
I take a walk on Chestnut street to see what news is new."
Every Jack and Jill has his or her own ideas of a Saturday afternoon adventure. Our stenographer hastens off with a laughing group to the Automat and the movies. Our friend with the shell-rimmed spectacles, tethered by a broad silk ribbon, is bound to the Academy of the Fine Arts to censure the way Mr. Sargent has creased John D. Rockefeller's trousers, and will come back bursting with indignation to denounce the portrait "a mere chromo." We ourself hasten to the Reading Terminal to meet a certain pair of brown eyes that are sparkling in from Marathon for lunch and a mobilization of spring millinery. And others are off to breast the roaring gusts of March on the golf meads or trundle baby carriages on the sunny side of suburban streets.
But there is another diversion for Saturday afternoon that is very dear to us, and sometimes we are able to coax B——— W——— to agree. That is to spend two or three glorious hours in the library mulling over the dictionaries. Talk about chasing a golfball over the links or following Theda Bara serpentining through a mile of celluloid, or stalking Tom and Jerry, mystic affinities, from bar to bar along Chestnut street—what can these excitements offer compared to a breathless word-hunt in the dictionaries! Words—the noblest quarry of the sportsman! To follow their spoor through the jungles and champaigns of the English language; to flush them from their hiding places in dense thickets of Chaucer or Spenser, track them through the noble aisles of Shakespeare forest and find them at last perching gayly on the branches of O. Henry or George Ade! The New Oxford Dictionary, that most splendid monument of human scholarship, gives moving pictures of words from their first hatching down to the time when they soar like eagles in the open air of today.
We know no greater joy than an afternoon spent with dear old Dr. Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, published after seven years' patient labor in 1755. Probably somewhere in Philadelphia there is a copy of the first edition; but the one we know (at the Mercantile Library) is the revised fourth edition which the doctor put out in 1775. One can hardly read without a lump in the throat that noble preface in which Doctor Johnson rehearses the greatness and discouragement of his task. And who can read too often his rebuff to the Earl of Chesterfield, who, having studiously neglected to aid the lexicographer during the long years of his compilation, sought by belated flattery to associate himself with the vast achievement? "Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?" And who does not chuckle over the caustic humor of the doctor's definitions of words that touched his own rugged career? "Lexicographer: a harmless drudge;" "book-learned: versed in books or literature; a term implying some slight contempt"; "Grub street: a street in London much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries and temporary poems."
O. Henry was a great devotee of word-beagling in dictionaries, and his whimsical "review" of Webster deserves to be better known:—
"We find on our table quite an exhaustive treatise on various subjects written in Mr. Webster's well-known, lucid and piquant style. There is not a dull line between the covers of the book. The range of subjects is wide, and the treatment light and easy without being flippant. A valuable feature of the work is the arranging of the articles in alphabetical order, thus facilitating the finding of any particular word desired. Mr. Webster's vocabulary is large, and he always uses the right word in the right place. Mr. Webster's work is thorough, and we predict that he will be heard from again."
What exhilaration can Theda Bara or the nineteenth putting green offer compared to the bliss of pursuing through a thousand dictionary pages some Wild Word We Have Known, and occasionally discovering an unfamiliar creature of strange and dazzling plumage?