Tryst with words

During the last week I savoured William Dalrymple's 'The Golden Road'. It was after long that I read a book with 2 dictionaries and a thesaurus by my side. This book I was keen to read since a while, the dictionaries and the thesaurus however, I picked up on whim. The thesaurus was Collins (~ year 2006, pages 799), one of the dictionaries was The Pocket Oxford (~ year 1999, pages 1,089) and the other Oxford Advanced Learners (~ year 1989, pages 1,579). 

Over the recent years I have gotten used to web-based dictionaries if a computer is handy. This is fine when I am working online but seldom the case when I am reading - especially given the locations I usually read at and the positions I am then in. So, more often than not, I plan to look up the words later and then conveniently end up forgetting them. People wiser have warned, later is a time that seldom arrives! On occasions I have also convinced myself that if I keep the book aside to delve into a word or two it will take me away from the wonderful mahaul the book has created.

I had not used the dictionaries, and the thesaurus, since a while. As I dusted and flipped their yellowed (with disuse) pages, my hands and the books took a while to recognise each other. As I moved slowly, from one word to the other, I realised that it has been some time since my brain has been troubled to recall the sequence of the letters in the alphabet! It also struck me that these days I hardly pick up books as thick as these dictionaries and lesser still pick up books for a quick dekko. Some words made me scratch my head - Had I come across the word previously? Did I try to understand the word then or had just assumed its meaning by reading and rereading the sentence? Or, worse, had I used it earlier and since gone blank on what it meant?

As the number of words which I could not clearly comprehend increased I began to make a list. Few of these words were short (~ toga), few long (~ thalassocracy), few I vaguely recalled having come across previously (~ lumber), few I had no idea of (~ entrepot), few were missing from the pocket dictionary (~ onyx), few from the other (~ ziggurat) and more than a few from the thesaurus (~ cuneiform). These words brought up more questions - Are words removed from the dictionaries when people stop using them or when the thoughts behind the words disappear from the society? Do archaic words get the ethos of the earlier times better ie does it help to use archaic words when dealing with earlier times? Either ways words and history appear intertwined. 

I take hand-written notes regularly but writing this list turned out to be anything but simple. Each letter needed to be clear for else the list would be redundant. I felt a strange consciousness overcome me. Then, like the ink flowing in the pen, the questions flowed in my head. Some of these left me surprised - Was it better if I stayed away from writing in cursive? Was I sufficiently clear when the words were long? Was I at ease while writing some letters and not so with some? If a stranger got hold of the list would s/he comprehend the words clearly?

All of these ensured that my progress was slow but it also gave me time to engage with the words. I also ended up meeting words that I had not planned to; it was not very different from accidentally meeting an acquaintance after long. This journey with ‘The Golden Road’ also allowed me to be then and there, in the present, with the words, and with the book. This is perhaps not very different from how Buddhism, that the book also talks about, asks us to approach life. 

As I look back at this journey with a smile I ask myself - Did I need William Dalrymple to write almost 500 pages on ‘How Ancient India Transformed The World’ to get back to engaging with words?