Dictionary Days

Unscrambling the language of a defining passion, this is a fabulously unconventional excursion into a consuming obsession with the marvels of language. The whole of The Catcher in the Rye is in the Oxford English Dictionary , waiting to be unscrambled, and so are all the novels of our past, present, and immediate future. A dictionary, despite its heroic effort to pin down language, is destined for failure the moment a single word is printed: for language, with its eternal mutations, is forever uncontainable. In Dictionary Days , award-winning essayist Ilan Stavans explores the very human need to seize upon the meaning of things and the continuing attempt to catalogue existence with meaningful lexical signals called words . Owner of hundreds of dictionaries, Stavans follows a fascinating, zigzagging history of lexicography across many languages, including English; French; Spanish; German; Arabic; Hebrew; Latin; and Cyrillic. Throughout his journey, Stavans spots strange meaning inconsistencies, uncovers unusual origins and shares extraordinary and often hilarious anecdotes. With a dazzling knowledge of dictionaries through the ages, matched with a lively wit, Stavans reaches far beyond the margins of the page and pays a worthy tribute to a discipline that is at once inspiring and maddening. For dictionaries are oracles: nothing is outside them - except the impossible.