I have just got enormous pleasure out of
Professor Tom
Pinney’s article in the recent Journal
(March 2015), on “Hard Words in Kipling’s Poems”. And in line with his remark
that many readers
“will know some of these words, but will any reader know all of
them? One may doubt”, I
set out to test myself.
Having read through the whole article, I had
another
quick(-ish) skim through, and reckoned that I could say I knew 28
of the 93
words, from sources other than Kipling himself.
Then I started to try and think about the ‘test’
analytically.
How do we learn our vocabulary? (These are the maunderings of
an amateur – a professional
linguist will no doubt have a better answer).
First of all, by being positively taught by our parents
(pointing to the
family cat – “cat”, and so on): then by copying our parents and
others around
us. Then by an extension of the first two methods, at school from
our teachers
and fellow pupils. And
then, by our own
efforts by Reading (the capital ‘R’ is deliberate, to emphasise
the importance). This, I
suggest, is the primary way we
increase our vocabulary after we’ve absorbed the basic words which
enable us to
get by in every-day life. The
other
means of communication are not nearly so useful – they may
introduce new words
to us, but we can’t say to the television presenter “What was that
you
said? How do you spell
that?”
So it’s books, and dictionaries and thesauruses
(thesauri?)
and lexicon (lexicoi? – I never had much Greek), and, Praise be!
they’re all on
line today (my County library subscribes to the OED, so all
Council Tax payers
can get access to what Professor Tom has described as an “almost
unfailing
resource”). I don’t even
have to walk across
from my desk to a book shelf (and I wouldn’t have the space for
the OED anyway).
Now, back to Kipling’s extended vocabulary, as
revealed
in his verse. I regard
myself as being
pretty familiar with it – the
(never-really-was-and-certainly-isn’t-now) Definitive Edition has
been my companion,
either on my bedside table, or in the book case which has my
‘ready-use library’
– the old favourites which I’m always consulting, or into which I
like to dip
from time to time – for some sixty years.
Despite my (assumed) familiarity with it, I still find
poems which I
cannot ever recall reading, or which, if I read, I didn’t bother
to analyse
word-by-word (and anyway, that’s not the way to read poetry for
pleasure).
Therefore, I thought I’d tackle the problem of
how many of
Professor Tom’s 93 words I could really claim to know, from the
other end, by
seeing if I could determine how many I definitely did NOT know. I came up with 37 unknowns. For one or two of them, the
meaning was clear
from the context (“when the Cambrian measures were
forming”); (“Wot
makes the soldier’s ‘eart to penk”); but the remainder
really were
unknown.
Then I went back to the ones I thought I really
did know,
and added another nine words, making 37. Many of them, I could say
with
certainty where I first encountered the word: for example, “bink”
(Adam Brunskill, by
Thomas Armstrong); “Dromon(d)”
(Gods, Heroes and Men of
Ancient Greece ,
by W H D Rouse); “Haulm” (my father, telling me he wanted my help
in clearing
the potato haulms off the two-acre field) “Patteran” (Swallowdale, by Arthur Ransome), “rax” (Hubble-Bubble, by Bernard Fergusson); etc.
A number of the words which Professor Tom found
unusual, I
knew because of my Scottish/naval background (“Peel”,
“Whitehead”).
Finally, the indeterminates – arithmetic says
that there are
19 of them: such words as “Catafract”, of which the meaning is
pretty clear
from the context. “Scough”
is another.
A fascinating exercise.
Who else wants to have ago?