Making Dictionaries

Have you ever tried to explain what something is to someone who has never seen or heard of that thing before? 

Say something you experienced while on a trip to somewhere “foreign.” Or something you use everyday to someone from another culture. Or an abstract concept to a student or disciple. Or maybe what a new craze or fashion is in your culture? 

Have you ever, during such explanations, used other things to compare it with? Have you ever, while explaining one thing, ended up explaining what another thing is because they didn’t know what the thing you comparing it with is? Have you ever had trouble explaining things because you used words or terms that the listener has never heard before?

Now, keep all this in your mind and get out a dictionary. 

Flick through it and read a random definition in it… and another…. and another…..

You may now have an idea why making a dictionary is no easy task … and one that can take years to complete. 

It took Samuel Johnson seven years to make A Dictionary of the English Language in the 18^th century. This is considered an amazing feat for an individual, if you consider how long it took some dictionaries to be made with the help of a team. The Brothers Grimm started work on Deutsches Wörterbuch (“The German Dictionary”) in 1838. It wasn’t complete until 1961 (well, a few revolutions, two world wars and the division of Germany during the Cold War did hold them up a bit (the team who worked on it after the Grimms died)).

Of course, Johnson and the Grimms were doing dictionaries for whole entire languages, making their efforts more tasking. But I bet even dictionaries that have limited what they could list (dictionaries on certain fields, like medicine, for instance) are as tricky to write as those epic productions of lexicography. 

Back in January I did a post proposing an interesting idea - a dictionary. "The Cultural Vandal's Dictionary of Visual Culture" it was originally called. Based in an old book I discovered it was a dictionary that contained images of how various things have been used in media. In other words, a dictionary of memes and how they are used in culture.

Back then, it was just an idea. 

Now, its a project that's going to (probably) take decades to do (on and off, while doing everything else). I've already bought an external hard drive dedicated to collecting images (and other things) illustrating entries and (just recently) I (sort of) finished writing a list of entries and their basic definitions.... which is the main subject of this post.

I want this book (it would be great idea to make it into a real book, like a real dictionary you'll find in a library) to be like an actual dictionary. A two or three column page layout throughout. But how I do the entries is a bit different. Each entry will begin with a small simplified picture of the subject (a picture so simple that (I hope) if embossed a blind person could make out what it is). Then you'll get its name (in English, the most learned second language on Earth) and a simple definition, before finally getting the text explaining it and examples of it.

Here's a random example of definitions I've written (as they are now. They may change in the future).....

Abacus A counting aid made from a ladder with beads threaded through its steps.

Circle A flat shape which results when you curve a straight line until the ends connect.

Flasher A person (usually a male) who exposes their uncovered body parts (especially those subject to taboo) in public.

Piano A machine designed to play music by a mechanism where pressed keys make hammers hit strings inside it. 

Salamander A wet-skinned lizard-like animal.

Spoon A tool made of a stick with a bowl attached at one end used to stir, dig into, or pick up food while eating or preparing food.

Trojan Horse A means to move a means of attack into a target without the target knowing it is an attack.

Wedding A ceremony where two people officially become a couple under a culture’s rules governing people pairings.

To write these I developed some rules.

• They have to be short (As much as possible, just one sentence). 
• I have to use a simple limited vocabulary. (try to use only words that are also found in the dictionary)

The "simple limited vocabulary" rule was inspired Randall Monroe's Thing Explainer. In it, all the text is written only using the "ten hundred" most-commonly used words in the English language. (the word "thousand" wasn't one of the "ten hundred.")

Admittedly, I did use a dictionary to aid me (and I haven't run them through Munroe's Simple Writer to check if they are as simple as they can be …. let). But, its a good starting point for this project. 

According to Microsoft Word's paragraph count feature, I have listed exactly 1,350 entries for my dictionary. So, this dictionary is going to be pretty big. (The book that inspired this project only had 1,200 entries)

The original dictionary that inspired this project was limited to memes used in visual media (it was a book made for graphic designers). My dictionary is going to expand to all forms of culture - music, poetry, cuisine, fashion, interior design, architecture, cave art, even language itself (One recent purchase was Written in Stone by Christopher Stevens, a book about the original Indo-European language and how its words led to the creation of the many words we use today).
One last thing, this is the final title for it - "The Cultural Vandal’s Dictionary of Memes, Metaphors, Tropes, Clichés, and the Occasional Stereotype."

Fictional Book #1 Candy, Milk, and Iron by Randall Munroe

Something I look up on the internet regularly is the What if? page on the xkcd web comic site. On this page, xkcd's creator (and former NASA roboticist) Randall Munroe would answer  hypothetical questions sent in by readers in a scientific (plus humorous) way.

Questions and scenarios the site has covered include...

What is the power output of Yoda?

Is it possible to retrieve Voyager 1 today?

How many printers will you need to update a printed Wikipedia?

If the Earth somehow began to expand 1cm in radius every second, how long would people take to notice?

Why can't Steve Brodovicz's daughter Keira, have a 1billion-story building?

and the classic...

What if everyone on Earth was at one place and all jumped at the same time? 

(That last one is a favorite of mine. In this scenario, everyone is transported to Rhode Island (the home of the Griffin family (and everyone else in Family Guy)) and after explaining what happens when they jump, he then explains the chaotic carnage that results when you transport everyone on Earth to the same place. Yelp, Randall thinks of the bits others neglect to think about.)

It was while reading one in that went out in May 2014 (What if all the pollen in the sky suddenly ignited?) that I found this text window....

screengrab from What if? page of xkcd (May 2014)

For those who can't make out the text, it says....

"Candy, Milk, and Iron was my unsucessful self-published follow-up to Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel."

Guns, Germs, and Steel is a Pulitzer Prize winning non-fiction book by American science polymath Jared Diamond. It was so good that National Geographic produced a documentary based on it in 2005.

It will take me ages to explain in detail what the book is about, but I can sum it up in a way. It is about how a number of factors, from climate and geography to farming and technology, allowed the "civilizations" of Eurasia (plus Africa and the Americas) to become what they are and dominate the "primitive" tribes. The title references three key factors in his argument. The guns represent military superiority through more advanced weapons. The germs represent the diseases that tribes that mastered domestication got exposed to, became immune to, and then (unintentionally most of the time, due to lack of knowledge of bacteria and viruses)  used to wipe out "inferiors." And finally, the steel represents more robust transport systems, such as roads and railways.

(Please note: While writing this I have never read the book or seen the documentary, but I do get (from reading the Wikipedia page) the "jist" of Jared Diamond's argument, as I have done my own research and thinking on history, and I have come to similar conclusions. But please don't take my words as the "final word" on the subject. Look at other arguments too before you decide your own conclusions.
Also, I don't believe in the distinction between "civilizations" and "primitive" tribes. "Civilization" is a word used too much as a term of segregation by people who think themselves as "civilized" and refer to everyone else as "barbarians.")

It's a simple title. A title that (cryptively) describes what it is about. But such a title can be easily abused. Any list of three random things can became a pseudo-title of a similar book... like Candy, Milk and, Iron. With such a book title (which can be open to interpretation) and the huge scope of the original book, its the sort of book you'll imagine someone like Randall Munroe would write (if he wasn't busy drawing stick figurines).

But, if he'd ever try to do so, here's an idea for the cover (this is the reason why this joke picked my interest). Using the most recent cover design of the book as inspiration....

Most recent book cover for Guns, Germs, and Steel 

(still available in most bookshops that sell science books (or Amazon))

Here's my design for Candy, Milk, and Iron....

Its a bit rushed, but this is a proof of concept work. I didn't have access to an x-ray machine so I had to manipulate my photos by inverting them, solarizing them and turning them monochrome. But the effect is similar.

This may be the first of a series of fictional book covers, so watch out for more.....