In pursuit of the trivial and the significant / A hitchhiker’s guide to the English-language galaxy

Ilan STAVANS is uniquely qualified to ponder the meaning of words and the many-splendored pleasures to be found in dictionaries, as he does in this fascinating collection of essays. A Mexican Jew whose ancestors came from Poland and Ukraine, Stavans has devoted his career as an academic and author to negotiating his way through the dense thicket of language across different cultures. Stavans, who is the Lewis-Sebring professor in Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College, may well be one of the few writers who could have both supervised the publication of Library of America’s three-volume series of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short stories and written a book about Spanglish. If language is a constantly shape-shifting codex, then Stavans is an unusually perceptive cryptographer.

Stavans is infatuated with words; this is a man who settles in to read from his cherished two-volume condensed version of the Oxford English Dictionary before he shuts off his bedside lamp. It is “the center of gravity” in his vast book collection. But as a translator and teacher of pan-cultural literature, Stavans is well aware of the OED’s limitations. Although one could conceivably learn “the entire memory of humankind” by reading all 615,100 words in the unabridged OED, it would be the memory of “English-speaking humankind.” However capacious, it still omits entire universes of thought and speech.

Stavans is fascinated by the OED’s Olympian attempt to encapsulate everything, but he’s more intrigued by the mutability of language, what all those words can’t convey. In essays that weave autobiography and playful historical riffs, Stavans celebrates the richness of words but at the same time checks their efficacy against the real, verbally elastic world.

That gap separating what one might call “settled language” and the constant cultural exchanges between languages is what Stavans is concerned with here. Traditional repositories of English such as the OED claim that all forms of linguistic miscegenation, especially slang, are bastard forms of language, but Stavans isn’t so sure. Why, for example, did the OED -- and by extension, virtually every significant English dictionary of record -- leave out the “F” word until recently? Because curse words connote underclass coarseness, and the original British authors of the OED were nothing if not class-conscious.

Throughout the history of dictionary writing, Stavans notes, the definitions of specific words have been shaded with historical context; hence the churlish exclusion of earthy four-letter words by the Victorian-era architects of the OED. Swear words, Stavans writes, are a “form of merriment.... [They] are loud. They are also popular. And why shouldn’t they be? That which is banned is most delicious.” Everybody swears, he says, “even America’s Vice President.” Meanwhile, certain Spanish slang words, such as “rascuache” -- a word that kinda, sorta means “kitsch”-- have no equivalent in English.

And what of the word “love”? It’s perhaps the most ineffable word in any language; Stavans looks it up in Italian, Slavic and Arabic but falls back on what Herbie Hancock once said about jazz: “It is something very hard to define but very easy to recognize.” It is, Stavans writes, “the sum of all contradictions and its negations as well. Can a lexicon encompass, in a single definition, such opposing thoughts?” No matter if it can’t; the joy of languages, for Stavans, is to be found in their disparity -- the way they can pleasingly intersect with or carom into each other in odd ways. *