Definitions

I feel a little bad about my previous sentiment on LitCrit.  There is one notable aspect that I actually love: the origins of the stories we tell.  Folklore, fairy tales, fables (and to a lesser extent myth) fascinate me in that we still use these same stories in our bestsellers and blockbusters.  I love finding out how old our 'modren' concepts really are.  Similarly, I took a year of college Latin primarily because of my love for etymology.  I gave my mother a bit of a shock when an Amazon order of mine was delivered to my parents house rather than my school address.  She called me concerned, "Did you intend to order a dictionary?"  Yes, I had, Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable  to be exact.  As Terry Pratchett puts it in the intro,"Brewer's is ostensibly a reference book, and an indispensible one. But it is also an idiosyncratic adventure, pulling you in and saying: 'This is, in fact, not what you're looking for; but it's much more interesting.' And, of course it usually is."  This book and others like it are resources for common English idiom and popular and literary allusion.  I keep a list in the back of phrases I try to look up but aren't included... yet.  I own the 17th edition, but the 18th has already been published.

I have a few standard dictionaries (Webster, Spanish to English, Latin), but the internet is rapidly making them obsolete.  Dictionary.com is my friend when I write, particularly its thesaurus.  Also in my collection is Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary, which I picked up for a dollar somewhere or other.  It is notably the only dictionary I read for pleasure, although I'm only to "I".  Definitions on this blog will be regularly supplemented with entries from The Devil's Dictionary.  I also have a passion for books of miscellany, but will relegate these to another post.

 The root of dictionary is diction— style of speaking or writing as dependent on choice of words and -ary a suffix denoting objects, esp. receptacles or places.  Therefore, a dictionary is a word receptacle.*

Literature has roots in the latin 'literatus'— learned, scholarly, which comes from 'lettre'— alphabetic character. 'Litterature' means grammar.  So, only written, grammatical, scholarly works count as literature. Sorry, internet.

And for the record: criticism— the act of passing judgment as to the merits of anything. Critic comes from a Greek word meaning "skilled in judging".*  I rest my case.


* From The Devil's Dictionary (henceforth FDD):
dictionary- a malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.
critic- a person who boasts himself hard to please because nobody tries to please him.