I like to play with other people’s words. Most of those words are now in the public domain, so everybody else’s words are also yours and mine. And R.W. Emerson lectures us that every word was once a poem, a new creation. That makes poetry of Kleenex and Goof-Off. (Emerson didn’t say “good poetry.”) I frequently think of him when I speak and try to watch my tongue. There are lots of vacuous and a few vicious people afoot. I hear them when I speak or quote their words, which are now our elected words, bad money driving out good: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” or “Sorry, losers and haters, but my IQ is one of the highest—and you all know it!”–Well, the rest will be silence soon enough. Oh for the days of silent Cal Coolidge: “I have noticed that nothing I have never said ever did me any harm.”
One evening in the 1990s I consciously tried for Emerson’s new-word poetry. I had decided to sign up for the increasingly popular and no longer faddish e-mail. Those who always know had cautioned not to use my real name in my address. Junk mail problem. No surveillance issues back then. I tilted a few times at the sign-up form’s “choose a name” windmill, failing to spear an untaken one. I sighed, sat back, inhaled, articulated the exhale and heard me say, slowly & creatively, ‘Suspiry’.– Bingo! I’d never heard or read the word, but it was gentle on my mind. I felt during that long instant both poet and email qualified.
But one poem did not me a poet make. My instant had passed (in Bacchius meter) and I returned to habitual rhythm. I entered my email name on the server’s info request. I assume I agreed to their terms and conditions, and feeling overconfident and expansive I put “Poet” in my profession box.– Enter Skepticism: “You? A poet?” I decided to check “suspiry” in the Oxford English Dictionary, unabridged, which advertises itself online as “the definitive record of the English language, featuring 600,000 words, [that is, first-word poems] 3 million quotations, and over 1,000 years of English.” (Shakespeare’s fans credit him with about 30,000 words and 1,700 new ones) If “suspiry” wasn’t in the OED, I was a poet.
Deflation doesn’t gently sigh. It whooshes. I had barely missed the laurel crown. The OED publishes the first and only occurrence of the poem-now-word “suspiry” in 1398, author anonymous. It meant “A breathing; respiration.” It’s obsolete and rare. Singular, one might say. That’s my online name. Scoring second out of 600,000 ain’t bad. Still, someone else had made the poem “suspiry” 625 years ago. For me, close but no poetic cigar. So much for my poem.
But a word or two about the iconic OED. Beware of boosting yourself as “the definitive record of the Englsh language.” Nice word ploy but deceptive implication that there are no more, that these 600,000 are all there is. You’ve missed at least one: “gantlet.” You call it merely a variant spelling of “gauntlet,” that mailed glove one throws down as challenge to a noble rival (or it’s the two parallel lines of armed folk beating you as you run between them). Incomplete definition. Over here, across the water where perhaps we are resistant to tyrannical force and lingo, “gantlet” is a free-standing word-poem, meaning: “a [railroad] track construction used in narrow places, in which two parallel tracks converge so that their inner rails cross, run parallel, and diverge again, thus allowing a train to remain on its own track at all times.” Commuters at suburban rail stops can see gantlets at the ends of their platforms.– Parallel tracks, convergence, divergence, remain on own tracks at all times…a good metaphor for life in a certain kind of society.
Merriam-Webster, which modestly boosts its mere “300,000 words from the most authoritative English dictionary continuously updated with new words and meanings” also missed this definition of “gantlet.” I got it from humble Dictionary.com, which doesn’t boast and has an interesting logo.
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