Reading the OED
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While I'm saying nice things about general-audience books on linguistic matters, I'll add a mention of Ammon Shea's Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages (Perigree), which came out in August. Shea, who describes himself as a collector of words, did indeed read the OED (the second edition, from 1989), from beginning to end, over the period of a year, and tells us about the experience in this off-beat but charming book. (Shea tells me he was aiming for dyspeptic, but it doesn't come off that way to me.)
The bulk of the book is a set of short essays on particular words, arranged into chapters by letter of the alphabet. Readers will probably be struck right away by how few of these words are familiar and how many of them seem to be of little use. This is not just a consequence of Shea's selection; as he remarks, MOST of the words in the OED are unfamiliar to most people these days and many of them are of dubious utility.
Well, the OED is a record of history, and many of the words in it have passed out of use — often because the referent is no longer relevant in modern life (the verb lant 'to add urine to ale, in order to make it stronger', the noun midlenting 'the custom of visiting parents on the fourth Sunday after Lent and giving them presents'), but sometimes for no obvious reason (the clearly useful adjective redeless 'not knowing what to do in an emergency' has unaccountably vanished). For others, it's not clear why anyone would have wanted a word for this specific meaning: the adjective unbepissed 'not having been urinated on; unwet with urine', for example.
Even in Shea's list, there were some words that were familiar to me, among them debag, iatrogenic, jive-ass, misandry, sitzfleisch, surfeited, trumpery, and upchuck (not a complete list).
In the K chapter, Shea uses an anecdote to take up a topic we've posted about on Language Log several times and will return to again. The story is about Shea's 11-grade English teacher Mr. Wozniak, doing a unit on homonyms. After alter–altar, he moved on to horde–hoard. Shea recounts what happened next (p. 100):
We never got to the next word, as I raised my hand and called out that there was another homonym for hoard and horde. I wasn't trying to be a smart aleck; I honestly thought that he had forgotten to include the word.
"Another homonym for hoard? Hmmm … very interesting, Mr. Shea … I don't believe I know it–perhaps you could tell us what that word is?"
"The word is whored, as in, the squire whored his way across all of London," I proudly exclaimed, and then spelled the word, just in case my point hadn't been made. The class tittered predictably, and Mr. Wozniak's face turned an interesting shade of red …
"That is not a word!" he thundered.
"But–but I just read it last week in–"
"Enough! That is not a word!"
Shea goes on to rail against the "not a word" people and against those who propose to adjudicate whether something is or is not a word by seeing whether or not it's "in the dictionary". I looked at this topic most recently here (and I've been squirreling away material for another "not a word" posting for some time); I commend to you the comment on that posting by Grant Barrett (reminding you that Grant is an actual lexicographer).
To appreciate Reading the OED you have to have some measure of Word Lover in you, some inclination to take aesthetic pleasure from individual words, similar to the pleasure some people take in collecting pretty or peculiar stones and shells. Some linguists are dismissive of the Word Lovers among us, pointing out that they are merely collecting trivia, of little scientific value.
Well, I say, the enterprise is harmless — and also that professionally made collections can have scientific value, as data for examining linguistic variation and change and the social and cultural dimensions of language use.
I do understand why some of my colleagues are impatient with the Word Lover genre: it fosters the misapprehension that linguistics is ALL about individual words (especially those that are in some way entertaining), and it draws people's attention away from the questions of language structure, variation, change, and use that engage most linguists professionally. This is genuinely frustrating.
Shea does confront the "useless bits of information" criticism. On page 192, in the V chapter:
… is all this information really any more useless than much of the rest of the knowledge I've accumulated over the years? For example, at some point in the last thirty years I learned that Andrew Jackson's nickname was "Old Hickory" and that an earthworm experiences a rise in temperature of about one degree Fahrenheit for every three hundred feet it burrows into the ground [the first I knew; the second is news to me — AMZ]. Are granch, grassil, and the rest of the teeth-gnashing words of any less value?
And then on page 211, in the Z chapter, he is open about collecting words as an aesthetic enterprise:
I used to enjoy fishing. But I hated catching fish, so I would take great pleasure to ensure this wouldn't occur, by baiting the hook with nothing and fishing in places where I was fairly certain I would have no accidental success. My reasoning was that sitting on a dock or a riverbank, smelling the water and listening to its sounds, was a perfectly splendid to spend a few hours–why would I want to ruin it by hooking and reeling in a fish?
In its own peculiar way, the OED has been my fishing pole, the means by which I while away a great deal of time in seclusion and accomplish nothing concrete. I have no intention of using these words I have found; their enjoyment comes primarily from simply finding them and recognizing that they exist.
No drive to improve his vocabulary or to show off his knowledge. Just enjoying bright shiny things.