What does it mean? I reach for my cell phone to search an online dictionary but an impulse stops me mid-reach. My hand recoils in antipathy.
It yearns for something else—something tucked away in its muscle memory. Surfacing like an air bubble, the memory bursts and takes form. I want a dictionary, blockish and tactile; next to me on the bed or side table, shoring me up. I want to climb out of my ignorance by reaching for a solid hold. How long has it been since I could count among my belongings a big red book that held the entirety of the English language?
I have marveled for years over the instantaneous access to meaning via the internet. Input, click, output. Almost no waiting at all. No heft either, or paper edges brushing my fingertips; left thumb strumming the folios as they fan out in response to my plucking. Pffft. Whoosh.
“Dad, what does iconoclast mean?”
I know his answer before I ask the question.
“Look it up.”
Thus I was trained early on to do my own research. As a young adult in Europe, my backpack was always equipped with a bilingual dictionary. At the end of the day in my closet of a rented room in Cuatro Caminos I lay in bed, pocket dictionary in hand, looking up the words that seasoned my ears by Madrileños at the mercado when negotiating a purchase of chorizo; dos cientos gramos por favor.
On the terraced slopes of Martigny I communicated in French with my travel companion Hubert, as we picked Pinot Blanc grapes for a family owned vineyard. We lied and said we were married so they would let us share the only room they had left. Before we crossed into this Swiss village from Chamonix, I worked as an au pair to an adorable three year old named Elsa, and my French/English dictionary, a miniature bound in blue plastic, accompanied me through the daily and necessary interactions of survival in a foreign land.
“Hunnnnnny…do we have an old fashioned dictionary anywhere in this house?”
Mi amor, a lover of paper and pencils, brings me the familiar Webster’s II, New Riverside University Dictionary, a replica of my own from the college years.
I have just read the epigraph of Edmund de Waal’s family memoir the Hare with Amber Eyes. It is a quote from Cities of the Plain, the fourth volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
“I open my heart to myself like a sort of vitrine, and examine one by one all those love affairs…”
In lazier moments my wont is to skip over an unknown word, assign it an imaginary meaning and convince myself I am getting the gist of the intention. But caffeine was surging through my veins and my best guess at a definition was a glass decorative urn…it wasn’t cutting it.
I embraced the three dimensionality of my old pal Webster, slipping the tip of my thumb into the quarter-sphere index notch marked U-Z. I’m rewarded with a diminutive image, a pleasing line drawing of a tree next to a botanic detail of its be-leafed twig.
upas 1. A tropical Asian tree, Antiaris toxicaria, yielding a milky juice used as an arrow poison.
That’s what I’m talking about! How would I ever have learned that from an online dictionary? Is it crucial knowledge? Maybe not. Will I ever use it? Unlikely, as I don’t live in Malaysia nor do I hail from the Orang Asal peoples. But that’s not the point! Going down the rabbit hole of a reference book used to be an almost spiritual experience for me.
I proceed: my gaze ping-pongs from vascular to voracious, Venn diagram to vituperous until I home in on vitreous. And that is where my search ends. No vitrine anywhere in sight.
It must be a French word.
Feeling dejected I once again reach for my phone/calculator/camera/dictionary.
vitrine(n.)
"glass show-case for display of delicate objects," 1880, from French vitrine, from vitre"glass, window-glass," from Latin vitrum "glass"
Well that makes sense. Good to know. I check the publication date of the Webster’s: 1984.
Time to buy a new dictionary. I’m thinking of springing for an OED.
