2007 10 Words and Books

Words and Books

One day I started to count the books in our home library. We own about two thousand volumes. Then I started to count how many I had actually read. While all of them have been looked at, I have read only about a third of them cover to cover. Some of the gap is because many of them are in R’s field of interest. A good portion of the gap is because many of our books are reference in nature. Encyclopedias and travel books are key examples of books we use from time to time to check a fact or plan a trip.
Recently R and I went on a trip through the Southeast parts of Utah and Southwest part of Colorado. We went to our library to learn what would be good to see there. Among our book treasures I found a volume inscribed in my grandmother’s handwriting: “________ ___ Brooklyn Ave. Oakland Calif”. Dated 1947, this book’s title is “Exploring Our National Parks and Monuments”[1]. It was written by Devereux Butcher, Executive Secretary, National Parks Association and published by Oxford University Press in New York. All photographs are black and white, but they are stunning even sixty years later. One of the photographs which fascinated me was the one of Mesa Verde. The caption reads in part, “Cliff Palace is the largest of Mesa Verde’s many hundred prehistoric Indian cliff dwelling ruins.”[2] I compared the photo in the book with a digital image I took on our trip several weeks ago. Sure enough, the site has been well preserved in spite of multiple millions of visitors since 1947.
So the book provided a terrific narrative of what to expect. The differences between the 1947 copy and our 2007 experience are fun. For example, the book states, “Daily bus service to the park is provided...”[3] Today, there is no demand for bus service as most travelers arrive in sport utility vehicles and nicely air conditioned cars, perhaps with the exception of travel coach tours.
Have reference books become obsolete due to the fingertip search engines of the internet which allow almost instant access to a wide variety of information? Perhaps. When it comes to the information, that might be true. Nevertheless the tactile nature of books is exciting. In many respects books are easier to use as reference tools because you can thumb through hundreds of pages in a few seconds. In contrast, on most search engines, you can search through thousands of entries in a matter of seconds by entering a few key words. In addition, you can change subjects almost instantly. As information is updated, it is possible to obtain the latest knowledge of a field from news reports and educational articles. What you gain is the access to the current version. To some extent, part of what you lose on the internet is the historical record of the past. Even that is gradually changing with the copying of libraries such as the Bancroft Library at the University of California. What you miss on-line is the ability to quickly locate items which you used to have at your fingertips. This is particularly true in my occupation. I used to be able to go right to a relevant page in our rate books in the time it takes to say, “Pull the book, flip to the proper tab”. Now the ratebook is online. To find an item now, I must to open the proper file, know the right word to ask, let the machine do the search and possibly get the right answer…much more time-consuming. However, I no longer have to have updated pages sent to me every several months which is a terrible waste of paper and time, especially when you consider that every person in the office has the same challenge.
It is fun to think how words originated. What I surmised might have happened is that the grunts and squeals we hear from animals in the wild or the zoo gradually took on meaning. As homo sapiens developed, I would guess that those grunts gradually became more sophisticated. Perhaps the soft hmm, meant “I’m feeling good right now”. Perhaps the hunt led to points of communication which meant, “There’s game over there”. It is not hard to imagine how that vocalization became more complex as people realized that sharing by way of language made life better for everyone. Of course trade was an important means of survival. That gave way for the need for agreements…and misunderstandings.
One time in my insurance business, I decided it would be good to summarize and insurance policy in language the lay person could understand. I was attempting to explain complex concepts in simple terms. Of course insurance policies are written by attorneys—our modern wordsmiths. Their intent is to define what is a covered loss and what is not a covered loss. Many court cases have been fought over the meaning of these words…testing the clarity of the policy language. It is clear that what is unambiguous to one person can be interpreted differently by another person. In my attempt to clarify the language of a policy in simpler terms than were used in the contract, I encountered what I will call “a profound stumble”. I could not out-perform the brilliance of the original drafters of the policy. Sometime, I encourage you to take out a policy booklet and read it! It’s pretty cool how they’ve answered the basic question: “Is it covered or not?” That language must be applied to a myriad of actual life events.
One of the funny things about language is that we use some words to mean different things. Pitch is one example. It can mean to throw, to set up a tent, to convince by selling an idea, to lurch, to slope, to describe the frequency of a musical note, or even describe the sap of a tree. The word “stable” can describe the place to put a horse or to illustrate steadiness. Alternatively, there are examples of ideas which require many different words to explain the same concept or idea. A word I used in the last sentence “steadiness” has a number of synonyms: Control, evenness, calmness, reliability, dependability and stableness.
How we convey our ideas in writing is interesting. We are soon to embark on a trip to Korea. There, they have adopted a system of characters which allows for phoenetic spelling. If you know how to pronounce a word, you automatically know how to write it. In English, we have spelling contests because it is amazingly complex how many possible ways we spell certain words based on tradition. Why we spell “does” the way we do is inexplicable. Shouldn’t it be “duz?” And why isn’t “fuzz”, just “fuz”. And “was” should be “wuz”! Since I’m on a roll, “’cause”, should be “cuz”. In Holland, they do the same as the Koreans with respect to spelling. It’s a phoenetic alphabet. So if you can pronounce a word, you automatically know how to spell it. Just as in Korea, the Dutch have certain rules which are applied consistently, even though they might at first seem strange. For example, the U sound as in food is spelled “OE” in Dutch. Words using that sound are boek and hoek, meaning book and hook. All this leads to my final point:

Speling

If I wur to invent speling
Id du it lyk this
So weed no how to ryt
“I luv yu, lets kis.”

Speling bees wud kansel
Cuz therd be no mor need
Teechurs kood retyr
Students wud just reed.

©Frank Bliss 2007 All rights reserved
October, 2007
[1] Exploring Our National Parks and Monuments, Devereux Butcher, Oxford University Press. New York, 1947.
[2] Ibid, p 50
[3] ibid, p 51