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Babylon dictionary of slang11/15/2022 ![]() ![]() But they are quickly disappearing from our archives. The old hierarchical systems, painfully imagined, allowed us to research in the tangled undergrowth of facts by providing logical sequences of numbers, letters or subjects, tidying up scholarly trawlings into volumes and chapters, creating indexes and tables of contents to dissect and reassemble the information. Written in our Age of Information, when the World Wide Web promises access to everything that we want to know and more, “You Could Look It Up” has an odd elegiac feel about it. Much has necessarily been left out: almanacs, biographical dictionaries, gazetteers, calendars, bibliographies, dictionaries of slang, mock reference books (like Ambrose Bierce’s “Devil’s Dictionary”), collections of proverbs, thesauruses. Explicitly borrowing the system of Plutarch (whose “Parallel Lives” explored the differences and similarities between great Greeks and their Roman counterparts) he chooses for each chapter “two more or less contemporary works on related subjects” and discusses them in their historical context, seeking to show where the ideas for the works came from and how they changed our view of the world. (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) of 1952, which seems to confirm the Cheshire cat’s dictum that “we’re all mad here.” Lynch ends, unavoidably, with Wikipedia, now in its 16th adolescent year.Īs Lynch himself explains, “You Could Look It Up” does not aim at being comprehensive. to Diderot and D’Alembert’s masterpiece of the Enlightenment, L’Encyclopédie medical manuals from Avicenna’s Kitab al-Qanun fi al-tibb of 1025 to the D.S.M. Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language repertories of censored books like the Catholic Church’s infamous Index Librorum Prohibitorum of 1559 rules of social conduct like Emily Post’s “Etiquette in Society” of 1922 geographical atlases including Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, credited with first imagining continental drift sprawling encyclopedias from Amarasimha’s Sanskrit Amarakosha of the fourth century A.D. the lexicographical volumes of what was then called the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Françoise and Dr. With admirable modesty, however, Lynch has constrained his work to just over 450 pages, in which he manages to discuss legal and scientific works like the Code of Hammurabi of the 18th century B.C. “I’ll argue,” Lynch says, “ - with only a small bit of exaggeration - that the reference book is responsible for the spread of empires, the scientific revolution, the French Revolution and the invention of the computer.” He then proceeds to unfold a sort of reference book of reference books, one of those magical volumes of infinite regress that, if it were to attain perfection, would include itself in its listing, and so on until the end of time. Jack Lynch, a professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark, and a scholar of lexicography, has written a lively and erudite history of that passion. Our passion for putting things in order has no end. Many of the fragments of clay unearthed in Sumeria (in modern-day Iraq and Kuwait), where the earliest known writing system was invented more than 5,000 years ago, belong to ancient dictionaries, ledgers and encyclopedic catalogs, from rudimentary inventories of goats and sheep to detailed chronological tables of the heroic lives and deeds of kings. ![]() Some of the earliest examples of written texts that have come down to us are proof of our passion for putting things in order. “And whatsoever Adam called every living creature,” Genesis tells us, “that was the name thereof.” In the beginning was a dictionary. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, even God submits to our chutzpah and brings to the brand-new Adam all the creatures he has made to see how Adam would define them. And yet, with stubborn pride, we see ourselves at the center of everything known and unknown, decreeing what things are, under what label they might be permitted to exist and what place they should be allotted on our library shelves. From the days of Copernicus to our own time, scientists have tried to teach us humility: that our minuscule species is only a speck on a tiny planet in one of the least important galaxies of the seemingly incommensurable universe. ![]()
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