by Steve Rosse

“Language can be thought of as articulate mind, as the means of becoming human, as the record of wit at play, as the right hand of thought, or as the great reservoir of symbol, but as a working tool it results from the use man has made of it.”

The sentence above is the first in a 20,000-word essay called “Language and the Dictionary” that prefaces the 1970 edition of Webster’s New World Dictionary. It was written by a man named Charlton Laird. The essay fills 16 pages, printed in a font so small I can’t even read it with my reading glasses. I have to take off my glasses and put my nose right on the page to read the words. I’ve had this dictionary for ten years but never noticed Mr. Laird’s essay until today. (How often do you open a dictionary at the very first page?)

I acquired the dictionary when it was thrown away by the hospital where I worked. The title on the spine is gilded, but the title on the cover is bare; the book has been pulled out of the bookcase so many times the gilt has completely worn off that surface. I suppose the dictionary was purchased new in 1970 and I imagine it was well used before Spell Check became a common tool, probably by at least a couple of dozen clerks in the 30 years before I inherited the book. I doubt that any of them ever noticed, let alone read, Mr. Laird’s essay.

Mr. Laird was a prominent enough writer that today he has a Wikipedia entry. Google provides almost 50,000 citations for his name. He was a writer of considerable talent who wrote in a variety of genres. He was a scholar and a teacher. He was successful and respected by his peers, enough so that when the World Publishing Company wanted somebody to write a preface to their new edition of Webster’s they sought him out.

They sought him out and I’m sure they flattered him and paid him well and probably provided their very best editor to help him. They gave him free rein and allowed him to pick his own subject. They gave him plenty of time to finish the project, perhaps as much as a year or even longer. And when he was done they printed his essay in a book that made its way into countless homes, schools, and libraries certainly all over the US and probably all over the world.

But out of all those copies, with that unbelievably thorough distribution and almost immeasurable shelf life, how many readers ever actually read Mr. Laird’s essay? How many readers ever began reading with that beautiful sentence above, on page xv, and kept reading the miniscule font and dense-as-concrete prose all the way to page xxxii? A few jealous peers, a few stalwart colleagues, perhaps his spouse and children. Over the years a random bored librarian, maybe a graduate student or two. But how many more? How many average readers, men and women who were not employed in the language business or related to the author, ever read the document he labored over? Mr. Laird was 69 years old when his essay was published in Webster’s. His essay in my dictionary likely reflects everything he’d learned in a lifetime of teaching and studying the English language. But who has ever read it?

I fell in love with his first sentence the first time I saw it. Pick any two commas in that sentence: what lies between them is more elegant, more precise and more sonorous than anything I’ve ever written. But even I have not read the whole essay. I’ve skimmed it. It’s a piece of writing that is a third of a novel in length, and as elegant and expressive as the writing is, much of it is still way over my head. The style predates a Baby Boomer’s short attention span: the sentences are long and complex and the ideas are subtle. It wouldn’t hurt a reader to have an education in linguistics and semantics. As wonderful as the essay must be, it’s a chore to read it. When I was in college I’d have eaten it up. But I no longer have that kind of energy; now I’m not a good enough reader to successfully read Mr. Laird’s essay.

The average book is read, perhaps, once. Then it sits on a shelf for a few years until its owner needs space, at which time the book begins its sad slide through garage sale or church bazaar to Senior Center donation to Goodwill and finally to the pulp mill. In the case of a trade paperback this whole journey could span as little time as a year or two. But Mr. Laird’s essay was printed in a book that was designed to stay on shelves for decades. (The Oxford English Dictionary has only come out with two editions in 80 years.) Dictionaries are typically used by more than one reader, in the case of library copies by perhaps a dozen readers every single day. Mr. Laird could expect a potential readership broader than that offered by any newspaper or magazine.

I wondered how many copies of Webster’s New World Dictionary had been printed that year. Turns out, despite the wonders of the internet and free long distance calling, it is impossible in a single day to find out this figure. But I did a little math: The American Library Association estimates there are 122,566 libraries in the United States. If we assume that only half of them had a copy of the 1970 Webster’s New World Dictionary on their shelves, and kept it there for only twenty of the past forty years, and we assume that each of those copies was used by just one person per day, that makes 438,000,000 users. If only one in a thousand of those users read Mr. Laird’s essay, that means 438,000 people could have read it.

The best selling American novel of 1970 was “Love Story,” which has to date sold approximately twenty-one million copies, dwarfing the readership of Mr. Laird’s essay. But the editor at the newspaper I used to write for said that I probably had about 10,000 readers on a Sunday. So even buried at the beginning of the dictionary, Mr. Laird’s overlooked masterpiece has likely been read by more than forty times as many people as anything I’ve ever written.

So if this piece of writing, which is the product of a very articulate mind, which represents the life’s work of a brilliant man, which has enjoyed a distribution wider than 99% of published books and has been available to an audience larger than I can imagine, has still languished in obscurity virtually unread, what chance do my meager efforts have? What point is there in my striving to construct an elegant sentence? Why bother to work late into the night trying to capture an idea in words?

I’ve been thinking about this all day. And now, here at the end of the day, I’m writing down my thoughts. Not because I think anybody else should read them, but because I have no other way to deal with them. I have always written down my thoughts. I will always write down my thoughts. I don’t have a choice. It’s nice to think somebody may read these words, but it’s not necessary. Mr. Laird says language is a tool, but he is very careful not to describe the tool’s purpose. He remains vague, saying only that it “results from the use man has made of it.”

Mr. Laird was not by nature a vague guy. He was a fastidious, rigorous, nit-picking guy who knew exactly how to use a semicolon. If he did not describe “the use” of language in his introductory sentence, the omission was deliberate.

I think Mr. Laird recognized that language has as many uses as it has users. In the case of this user, language is a fence around unruly ideas, a way to corral thoughts so they are tame and manageable. Language is a security blanket that keeps chaos out of my bed. Language is not so much a tool to me, as it is a friend, a friend I will continue to share my time with whether anybody else comes to the party or not.

Note on Author’s other work in Eastlit:

Steve Rosse’s Going Home can be found in the March 2013 issue of Eastlit and Requiem for a Heavyweight in the December 2012 issue.