Clinton S. Lopez refers to himself as "my father’s son, my son’s father." Or "the prodigal son most of the time, and the prodigious son the rest of the time." His interests include reading, writing, sports, and music. Gardening, baking, and making handicrafts are his hobbies. He is currently a production section manager handling penicillin and cephalosporins at Interphil Laboratories-Pharma Industries.
Words are like people: they are born, they grow and age. Everyday we meet words without ornaments; others are dressed up. They travel across the globe, marrying and intermarrying. Many become immortal; others die or fade away.
Like us, words also have stories to tell. These stories are collected and recorded in books called dictionaries. At home, our Third College Edition of Webster’s New World Dictionary alone carries more than 150,000 main word entries, and every main entry is a story on its own that tells about a word’s spelling, its pronunciation and syllabication, the part of speech it belongs to, any irregularity in its inflected form, its origin and how it developed, its definition, its usage, and any restriction to its usage. For instance, let’s take a commonly used foreign word:
bon.sai (ban’si’, ban si’) n. [[ Jpn bon, lit., basin or pot + sai, to plant ]] 1 the art of dwarfing and shaping trees and shrubs in shallow pots by pruning, controlled fertilization, etc. 2 pl. bon’sai’ such a tree or shrub.
This entry takes me on a quick trip back to the word’s origin and history; it shows how two other words combine to form the main word "bonsai," literally "to plant in a pot." At the same time it gives me a peek into Japanese culture and a brief description of its art form of growing trees in miniature.
Opening the pages of this thick red book unlocks the doors to a vast library of information and a great treasure house of knowledge within, and points to new and endless possibilities.
Ironically, I clashed with my very first dictionary, an earlier edition of Webster’s, when we initially met.
In grade school, I considered any book thicker than an inch and published in fine print as The Enemy, and any teacher who gave reading assignments and homework that asked for definitions of 10 new words each time was The Slave Driver. Woe to her who required us to use each word in a sentence! And not just any sentence, it had to be a sensible sentence.
Back then, I consulted the dictionary most often only for the spelling and meanings of words, while the etymology, usage and acceptability were ignored. We generally considered Webster’s as the authority that dictated how to speak and write in English, so young boys really had no escape from sifting through the pages in search of those word definitions for our assignments. It was a difficult, boring task for me, one I did with a good deal of grumbling.
My classmates and I were an unruly bunch of schoolboys who settled our differences after classes beneath the macopa tree behind the Grade 3 wing. Everybody was called by names taken from our reading assignments, from comic books, anywhere. The smallest guy in class was named Bonsai. Flatus Boy derived his tag not from dishwashing chores, but from the blast of air he expelled. On the other hand, from his two large front teeth another classmate earned his moniker Jack Arizona White (the last two names referring to a hybrid of rabbits). No less than our top classmate, alias Brainiac, nicknamed me the Juvenile Delinquent, and this was okay with me because it sounded fine. (Besides, J’s and Q’s were high-scoring Scrabble tiles.) I accepted the name – that is, until I chanced upon its definition in the dictionary.
From then on, it helped improve my vocabulary and introduced me to the mystery and magic of words. The thick red book began to evolve from foe into a newfound friend especially after I tired of building castle walls and bridges out of tiles from our Scrabble set, and took the game seriously. Webster’s roused my interest in reading and writing, and I started to respect and care for the dictionary, and other books for that matter.
My teacher, The Slave Driver, often harped on the care of books: "Keep your books clean and dry; do not write on the pages." "Never use any thick object as a bookmark." "Do not fold the pages."
If grade school homework came in trickles, our high school assignments came as a deluge, but our literature teacher devised a clever tool to make our first meetings with new words such pleasant occasions. She taught us Word-O, a game resembling Bingo except that words were played instead of numbers. Each student prepared his cards by writing words from vocabulary lessons in the squares on the cards. At game time, the definitions were called out, and players marked the corresponding words in the squares. The first player to correctly fill up the rows of squares would announce "Word-O!" out loud, and earned bonus points. The weekly sessions were a sure, amusing means of leading us to search through the dictionary, a vital item in my high school survival kit.
Chemistry, one of my more scary but fascinating college subjects, introduced me to the benzene ring, aqua regia, and a host of other mind-bogglers. Here I met up-close the isomers, compounds having the same molecular formula but different arrangements of atoms. While immersed in these atoms and compounds, I toyed with the idea of the "chemistry of words" wherein an isomer translated to any of two or more words composed of the same letters spelled differently. Thus, the letters a, e, l, p, s and t formed plates, pleats, pastel, petals, palest, septal, and staple, whereas the isomers of "stop" were opts, post, pots, tops and spot.
Through the years, my compilation of isomers from the dictionary, other books, billboards, TV ads, bottle labels, trademarks, and lately from the computer has given me a wide range of ammo for Scrabble, best played with a Webster’s nearby. I’ve also had endless hours of enjoyable and challenging mental exercises from other games such as Squabble, Boggle, Skrib-age, Word Squares, and a word-forming spin-off from MasterMind the Game of Logic.
Nowadays, the dictionary still serves as an authority on how we speak and write, but it is not a dictator that orders me how to use words; rather, it’s a guide that offers me a variety of choices from which to pick the words I prefer. It remains a handy reference for crossword puzzles and word games, and proves very helpful when I experiment with brainteasers, codes, palindromes, anagrams and mnemonic devices.
See what a few twists in words can create:
A karate teacher who talks meaninglessly is called a non-sensei.
A valuable lesson in tae kwon don’t is never block your foe’s roundhouse kick with your face.
Nothing to worry about with cardiac arrest; in layman’s terms, it’s just the captivation of the heart.
Wife asks, "Miss me?" Husband answers, "No, missus you."
A plutonic (not "platonic") relationship results when one of the partners becomes just like the planet Pluto: cold and remote.
The notice at the back of a truck says: "House my driving?" It’s bad; better stay home. I’ll call you on your hut line.
If you misspelled the sign at your gate with a "b" to read "Garbage Sale," will people come to buy your trash?
A deserted desert. A curious mix? Other interesting combinations are parenteral guidance, tubal litigation, a grain of assault, and lunch brake.
It’s funny how the unruly schoolboys of the past have grown and mellowed into – well, still unruly men. Bonsai is much taller. I heard Brainiac is a brain surgeon in the States. One has gone on to be a seaman, an officer by now. Surely, we wouldn’t have made it this far without the help of books, the dictionary included.
Today I work with a drug company (does this make me a drug lord?), but a lot of writing, notes and memos, correspondence, report preparation, records and documentation, and consumer feedback monitoring goes with the job. Even other company activities rely on word power. Years ago, an unusual name I suggested for our volleyball team was chosen, and I believe it helped fuse us into a solid back-to-back champion team for six years. Recently, my entry to the mascot-naming contest for our newsletter was selected. In both cases, I think some experience in giving names, being comfortable with words, plus much valuable support from Webster’s gave me an advantage.
I am really enjoying this. Perhaps I can still realize a long-time ambition of becoming a renowned freelunch – er, I mean freelance- writer.