Types of books in your arsenal
There are books that you read, and there are books that you refer to. Back in the day– before you could get an answer to any question by typing into the search bar of Google, or asking Claude, learned families often owned a set of encyclopedias. (Britannica if you were fancy, World Book if you were just curious about the world). Even now I remember pleasurable encounters with the heft of the Oxford English dictionary in high school. In the single volume the type is so small you need a magnifying glass.
Single volume OED, and requisite reading tools…
That book was thick enough to use as a step stool.
Other books you kept for reference? A thesaurus. Bartlett’s familiar quotations. Strunk and white. Dreyer’s English - funny story… I know Ben Dryer. When he was copy chief at Random House, I almost sold him my first novel (very very close, which is only good in horseshoes), which he really loved, but could not figure out the genre of. I once bought him a metal belt buckle inscribed with a picture of the Sutro Tower. I really wanted a book deal…He really liked San Francisco.
A Field Guide to the missing words is not necessarily a book that you sit down and read in one go. It is a book that you refer to. It’s a book that you go find when you vaguely remember that there’s a word that is the opposite of being homesick for a place you can’t get back to (hiraeth- Welsh). Sort of opposite a longing for all that is familiar and dear to you–that terrible beautiful ache (saudade, Portuguese). A word that actually means a yearning for faraway places. A longing for the unfamiliar, the unknown. A need to travel, to explore, to find yourself against a backdrop you do not recognize.
You look it up because even if you don’t know the word, you feel the yearning. And there is some strange, deep, and satisfying comfort in being able to attach a name to it.
A Field Guide to the Missing Words of North America is, among other things, of words you didn’t know you need.
