Lexicography

I have an urge to read - and to write. It struck me this morning, though, that my desire to read might not be driven so much by a need to understand what I am reading - or even to simply enjoy a good book - but, rather, to encounter new vocabulary instead. I have just started to (re)read Foucault's Madness & Civilization, for instance, and while I initially began to religiously note the trajectory of his thought it occurred to me that I was more interested in the words that he was using to convey his thought rather than his thought itself. That is not quite true for I have an abiding – and I would say healthy - interest in ‘sanity’ ‘and’ ‘insanity’ – ever since reading "Will there really be a morning" by Frances Farmer, upon which I understand the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was based, and which I first tried to read when I was twelve, for instance - and my fascination with a concept referred to as 'auto pathology' that I encountered through an article published in the now ceased journal of Auto/Biography - I have more or less consciously - for whatever reason, reasonable or not - been interested in, both detached and immersed, the so called divide between madness and sanity. But this morning I was more interested in the particular words being used themselves rather than the thought - the derivation and pronunciation of, for example - and I was compelled to find my dictionary (I have been re-united with my books but not my bookcases so that they, unfortunately, are still packed, haphazardly, sadly, not even in boxes, but in carrier bags - sometimes I must succumb to self pity and declare my life tragic - which meant that I had to frantically look for my dictionary by rummaging through numerous plastic bags before I could find it) so that I could look up certain words. In particular, I was stalled by the word "autochthonous". It is a strange word. It looks strange. And it looks as though it should be unpronounceable. I am uneducated - as Ian Hunter would say, I have a PhD in stupidity - so that while to many others this may be an everyday word to me it is new - and I wanted to familiarise myself with it. And that, of course, was when I realised this morning that my interest is not necessarily in what Foucault has to say but in how he says it. Indeed, while I was looking for my dictionary I came across my copy of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality, and while I remember these essays in particular for Nietzsche's description of the priestly and knightly caste, when I browsed it quickly in order that I might find reference to the two castes I was just overwhelmed with the frequent margin notes that I had made, which were not notes at all but definitions of particular words/phrases lifted perhaps straight from a dictonary. There would have been a time when I would never have thought I would have said this but I think a dictionary is one of the most enjoyable books that anyone could ever read. Not unlike 'Kierkegaard's' imaginary journeys with his father (in which of his numerous books I cannot recall at the moment), I am able to travel all over the place without leaving my seat - and I absolutely love it!