Online Dictionaries: 1 Essay

This essay by Philip Harvey first appeared in Eureka Street in March this year. A critical webography of online dictionaries follows this blog.

'Words, words between the lines of age,' sings Neil Young. His bittersweet song about relationships makes us dwell on how words that are meant to say everything are still just words. Sometimes they are all we have, and we try to say it the best way we can. We do not always succeed, and that is not just because of the words. But we will go on trying, we are all caught up in the daily traffic of words.

The lyric also reminds us that words themselves are born, alter, age, transmute, and even die. Their meaning shifts through time and may have a completely different — need I say awesomely different — meaning between age groups, regions, times and educations.

This has never been truer than in the case of 21st century English, the lingua franca of the planet. The sheer variety and vitality of usage across every continent by those for whom English is first, second, third, even 23rd language brings us rather too quickly to the whole matter of meaning. Meaning is a service of online dictionaries, but not always their forte. Meaning is what online dictionaries purport to supply, but how thoroughly and deeply depends on the purposes of their makers. Meaning is the aim of dictionaries, but whose meaning? And when were the definitions created?

Thoughts like this fizzed in my mind each time I visited Merriam-Webster, which was for a time the main internet dictionary through a process of availability, popularity, and algorithms. Samuel Johnson famously defined oats as 'a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people'. Merriam-Webster was not so susceptible to prejudice and gave short, straightforward definitions that were simple fare indeed. Merriam-Webster now seems to have gone the way of all business, so we turn to The Free Dictionary (American Heritage and Collins) which gives four definitions for oats, no history, and unhelpful links to muesli websites.

Better in this regard is dictionary.com (Random House) with six definitions and history of origins, including 'sowing of wild oats', the kind reported frequently in James Boswell's journals and studiously overlooked by his friend Johnson. But in none of these are we given an idea of which usages are the most common, nor is a date placed on archaic uses of 'oats'. This site has a voice box to click for pronunciation, which is good if you wish to say 'oats' like someone from Massachusetts.

The poet W.H. Auden kept the 13-volume Oxford English Dictionary in his writing room: he once called the room 'the cave of making'. At an older age his set had become so over-used it was falling apart and he considered purchasing a new one. Today the OED is online, so Auden would have had to subscribe, then renew that subscription each year. He would have foregone the pleasure of paging through entries at leisure for the rigour of pointing at entries with a cursor.

This might be okay if he wanted both the latest and the least meanings of a word, or wished to identify earliest uses of that word in any of its usages, but it would have cramped a serendipitous reading style that presented Auden with variations of a word, and have prohibited him from mining the forgotten words he set into his lapidary late poems.

In many ways this has always been the choice, between the concision of the popular prescriptive dictionary and the expansiveness of the great descriptive dictionaries like the OED. When we want a quick definition, we want a dictionary that matches our word in short order. This can be a problem when assessing new words. When we are translating, we want all uses of the word, proceeding by common usage.

The quality of internet definitions can be woeful, or wonderful, which is due in part to its democratic range of choice. The free online internet still needs to be treated with caution as a final reference authority and it is sometimes a worry to know that globally people turn to this source for definitive meanings every day.

Despite appearances, the forgoing grump is not aimed at the internet, but at the lack of thoroughness in free online dictionaries. You say tomarto and I say tomayto. The free ones are too often bland and incomplete in their definitions, while those that are complex and exhaustive require a credit card. Quality, it seems, comes at a price. This divide between what is free and what has a price tag on the internet is an increasing educational issue. Rich institutions and individuals can pay for the words we all use, while others cannot, or just do not.

But then maybe it's the internet itself that has become one big dictionary and our task is learning how to read it as we would any other new reference work at home or in our libraries and offices. I first heard the word 'bogan' over 20 years ago. It seemed to describe very imprecisely certain kinds of young men who loitered on railway stations and plazas. They wore running shoes, black clothes, loose cardigans and never combed their hair. In my mind's eye they resembled Kurt Cobain, but Cobain probably wasn't a bogan. The free online dictionaries today maintain that a bogan is simply a tranquil stretch of water found in Canada.

But interestingly, Wikipedia itself has the best overall perspective on this term. Its entry includes links to dedicated bogan websites, leaving one to understand that while 'bogan' is a term of derision for some, for others it is a badge of honour.

The OED does not provide this kind of sweep, and if you can pay for the inestimably worthy Macquarie, one of our seriously undervalued literary creations, you will be told that bogan is a colloquial noun (mildly derogatory) for 'a person, generally from an outer suburb of a city or town and from a lower socio-economic background, viewed as uncultured. Compare barry, bennie, boonie, Charlene, Charmaine, cogger, feral; especially Qld bevan; Chiefly Qld bev-chick; WA bog; ACT booner; ACT charnie bum; Tasmania chigger; Riverina gullie; Melbourne Region mocca; Victoria scozzer; Chiefly NSW westie.' These last are baffling even to many of the locals, let alone the global villagers who read this terminology beyond the land girt by sea.

Neil Young's lyric plays with the expression 'reading between the lines', that process not just reserved for poetry and government documents where the actual meaning of the words is less important than the implied meaning.

Another positive of treating the internet as a dictionary is the stupendous number of uses we can find for any one word. Those with the time can be extracting examples of the word in every setting, whether in its plain use, its minor uses, or its subtle 'between the lines' uses. By comparison, Samuel Johnson only had his memory to draw on, a circle of friends, and a substantial library. Prizes go to the best Johnsonian pronouncement upon being shown the internet.

Title Search

Philip Harvey 

This is the seventh in a series of pieces about the book in poetry released at this blogspot.
Quoting the opening line can serve as a reminder of the whole poem and serve as short-hand for the whole poem. This was the view of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. We know what he means when we volunteer the words “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness…” or  “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day…” or, if you are an Australian, “There was movement at the station…” An entire world of meaning and feeling is brought to mind, we connect to Keats’s enriching affirmation of autumn, to Shakespeare’s so-cool appreciation of the beloved, or to ‘Banjo’ Patterson’s alert to the action world of bush horses and their riders.

The same may be said of the titles of favourite books. Whenever the name Anna Karenina is even mentioned in polite society my mind fills with dozens of images and their lively connotations: Oblonsky (always Stiva) at the ice rink (the unforgettable opening scene), Anna’s conversation on the train with the countess, Levin scything the harvest, Vronsky at the racetrack. It goes on, my thoughts never crowded, and yet a society at work and all of it conjured back to life by mention of one woman’s name. To say ‘Anna Karenina’ is to be reminded of that whole world of fictive reality. Likewise, something like ‘The Wind in the Willows’ is not an incidental alliteration but an entire summer and winter of Edwardian high jinx and firm friendships. ‘The Trial’ is not a glum word for an avoidable circumstance, but a personal confrontation with modern, urban existence that stays in the mind for years, even if we have never lived in Prague and never known the miseries of the Habsburg bureaucracy. And so we could go on playing this game for hours.

The titles of books serve as short-hand for the contents of the book itself. This is never just a book, not even a fixed set of words, though we can count them all. (Films are the same, much of the time, the very words ‘The General’ or ‘Les Enfants du Paradis’ or ‘Apocalypse Now’ setting off connections that head in all directions.)

These thoughts were prompted by reading a favourite list poem (I have a weakness for list poems) called ‘Title Search’, by the American poet John Ashbery:

Title Search

Voices of Spring. Vienna Bonbons.

Morning papers. Visiting Firemen. Mourning Polka.

Symphonie en ut dièse majeur. Fog-soaked Extremities.

Agrippa. Agrippine. Nelly and All. The Day

the Coast Came to Our House.

Hocus Focus. Unnatural Dreams. The Book of Five-Dollar Poems.

Oaks and Craters. Robert, a Rhapsody. Cecilia Valdès.

The Jewish Child. Mandarin Sorcerers. The Reader’s Digest

Book of Posh Assignations. The Penguin Book of Thwarted Lovers.

The American Screwball Comedy.

Scenes of Clerical Life. Incan Overtures. The House on 42^nd Street.

The Man in Between. The Man on the Box. The Motor Car.

Rue des Acacias. Elm Street and After.

The Little Red Church. The Hotel District.

I’ll Eat a Mexican. The Heritage of Froth.

The Trojan Comedy. Water to the Fountain. Memoirs of a Hermit Crab.

The Ostrich Succession. Exit Pursued by a Turkey.

In the Pound. The Artist’s Life. On the Beautiful Danube.

Less is Roar. The Bicyclist. The Father.

    

This poem was first published in 1994, at the time when ‘Title Search’, that established search strategy on library catalogues, was first becoming part of common English parlance.  At least, common English computer parlance. The Ashbery poem reminds us that books are finite, they have what Sven Birkerts calls “ledge”. A poem that was a list of websites and blogspots, while it may conjure interesting conjunctions, would not have the same effect as the Ashbery poem because their names imply endlessness, infinity of possibilities, a distinct lack of “ledge”. (Electronic information culture has its own implications for poetry and language, but that discussion is for another time.)

What do we make of the Ashbery poem? Some titles cause the described effect. For example, I instantly recognise ‘Scenes of Clerical Life’, George Eliot’s first work of fiction, published in 1857. These are stories about different Anglican clergymen set in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. My immediate memories are of difficult parochial existences created by the social disputes of the period. The title reminds us of the start of that author’s long journey of ethical discovery, as she uses her Christian moral framework to test the changing mores of English Victorian society. A four-word title equals a range of meaningful responses. But soon Ashbery’s bibliography becomes baffling.

We can imagine the likelihood of such titles as ‘Vienna Bonbons’, which happens to be the name of a famous waltz by Johann Strauss, or ‘The Motor Car’, which would have to be the name of several books of the same title, one would expect. But other titles are not only unlikely, but completely impossible. ‘The Penguin Book of Lovers’ is just possible, ‘The Penguin Book of Thwarted Lovers’ not at all. A title search on Google fails in fact to detect ‘The Penguin Book of Lovers’; I don’t even bother trying Ashbery’s invention. Or one looks at a title like ‘Oaks and Craters’ with a mixture of amusement and disbelief. What kind of book could that be? The first hit on Google connects us to a residential address in Crater Oak Drive in Calabasas, California. Some titles evoke images of their own that could be books, or should be books, or will be books. ‘The Day the Coast Came to Our House’ sounds like the sort of book title that ought to exist, even if it doesn’t. One can imagine it existing in time and space, especially after Hurricane Sandy. Googling reveals the title of a poem by this name written in 2007 by Paul Cary-Kent, my guess being the title is taken from the Ashbery poem itself. Other book titles are so peculiar that they register as part of Ashbery’s own private language world of gags and conjectures. ‘Fog-soaked Extremities’, for example, seems considerably unbelievable, a work that if it existed would cause a sensation by its mere presence on a bookshop counter.

What is John Ashbery up to? At one level I think he is up to his usual tricks, confounding our expectations about the very purposes of a poem, deriving pleasure from the creative use and misuse of established forms, mucking up with high culture in order to enliven, enlarge, and enrage. At another level he is scripting his own series of comic excursions within the frame of a single work, the clue to this interpretation being the book title at the end of verse 2: ‘The American Screwball Comedy’.

But I think he is also fascinated by the power of a single book title on the individual mind. They have the ability to draw us in, to ask questions of the author and the content, to wonder at possibilities beyond the mundane. Once read, the title leaves us with other sensations, every sensation from the indifferent and forgettable to the utterly transformative and totally unforgettable. It is at this upper end of the spectrum that we find ourselves spending our time, our life enriched, tied as it has become to the simple object called the book.

Keyword Mythology

Philip Harvey

In recent years literary criticism talks about everything “outside the text” or says that, in fact, there is nothing “outside the text”. This is a means to reading that has met with a mixed press. But I would say we have to start seriously thinking again in our study and in our library work about everything that is “outside the internet”.  Because, for too many years now we have permitted people to live under the delusion that there is nothing “outside the internet”.

I cannot count the number of times I have found what I am searching for online by resorting to a printed book. Not that I’m counting.

And I have lost count, not that I started, of the number of learned articles in recent years published online and in print on the weaknesses and pitfalls of keyword searching.

What started out as a reference librarian’s dream, one-stop online information from every imaginable source, has turned into a quagmire of endless return pages, unmediated and undifferentiated links, too much information and often none of it immediately helpful.

Over ten years ago a common view took hold that the only search strategy you needed for a database was the keyword search. This view, some would still say this opinion, was augmented by the internet search engines of the time, where keyword was your one option for getting at the zillions of word hits online. Even the concept of search limiting, a byword of library catalogues, was news to many in the world of IT. Keyword was not so much an option as gospel, fitted onto every imaginable computer object as the failsafe way to the data.

Simultaneously a second myth about the internet emerged: it’s all out there and this is the End of the Book. Even though educated and informed web travellers knew this was not the case, and I include librarians in that number by definition, nevertheless we saw the easy takeover of the keyword as search of choice (there was never a choice) and the relegation of the book to some secondary and curious extra when it came to searching. Either/Or won the day over Both/And. But only for now.

My colleague in the Library Susan Southall is completing her thesis on the Rich in the Gospel of Luke. This means rigorously verifying all citations in the text for the footnotes. One quote was proving a particular challenge to re-locate, the first use of the expression “The very wage they receive is the pledge of their slavery.” This quote concerns the idea in the Roman Empire that a free person is no better than a slave when he receives a wage. It is Cicero, in his De Officiis, but where in De Officiis? A Google search delivered plenty of hits, in fact too many hits and not one of them able to take Susan to the quote itself or the precise Book and Paragraph and Line in the Cicero. It may be down there on page 17 of the thousands of hits, but then it mayn’t. Her solution was to check the classical dictionaries and books of quotations lining the Reference Section of the Carmelite Library. She found the reference first time: De Officiis Book 1, Para. 159. Where was that information? The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3^rd edition. Thus armed, Susan returned to the screen to find a classical database that had the full text of the work. Thanks to Google (thankyou Google) Susan found the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University. This is recommended. There she found lots of Cicero, and after careful self-tuition in how to search for author, title, and word, confirmed via Perseus the exact place where this wage slavery quote is employed in Cicero.

By mistake she also discovered that by putting an ess on ‘wage’ in Google she found a link to the phrase “Wages of Sin” in Cicero. Amazing, but that’s another story.

The idea that print books are one of the best tools for searching the internet is not news to a real reference librarian, or scholar. That standard reference tools continue to deliver ready information in-depth should not be a surprise, it’s why they were devised in the first place. But why doesn’t everybody appreciate this basic reality? The issue and the challenge is in educating our users in how to manage what looks like, to them, a stack of dated volumes that couldn’t possibly contain a jottle of what they’re on about. Some of our users only believe the answer exists if there is an app for it.  

All of this huge generation of research activity is premised on the governing power in our lives of the Keyword. In order to get what you want and to go where you want to go, you have to ‘make friends’ with the keyword search. Manoeuvre around it if you can, if that is possible, but the Keyword is the decisive mover in our study and reading. While it is the locus of our literary lives, the keyword to all mythologies, then we have to get creative with its centrifugal reality. Our relationship with the keyword search is not going away anytime soon.