| Filling the language gap
Review
WANTED WORDS 2
Edited by Jane Farrow
Stoddart, 132 pp.
The "Wanted Words" segment on CBC Radio One's "This Morning" asks listeners to invent words that describe common but previously undefined phenomena. The segment was so popular that its host, Jane Farrow, decided to put together a book. The book proved so popular that Farrow produced a sequel, which offers another original collection of newly minted words.
Farrow includes her own commentary on the definitions, as well as excerpts from some of the participants' letters, with illustrations by Five Seventeen. The result is a funny little dictionary of clever puns and hybridized words, such as Leaderhoser (a Canadian who wears shorts in the dead of winter), and Scumerbund (the line of dirty dishwater that decorates the stomach of a kitchen-cleaner).
More entertaining than the descriptive words are the language gaps themselves, and there are a surprising number of them. CBC "wordies" have written Farrow to demand definitions for everything from the plastic stick that goes between grocery orders at the supermarket, to the appalling but unavoidable habit of adopting other people's accents in conversation.
Wanted Words 2 is intended to amuse, but it also manages to raise a couple of interesting questions about the practice of lexicography, which is arguably uncreative, inexact and, occasionally, arbitrary. Some language gaps are accidental, and some are forms of political erasure – the word "homosexual" didn't show up in dictionaries until the latter half of the 20th century. Farrow and her "wordies" define the practice of Websterization – coined for the American lexicographer responsible for dropping the "u" from "colour," among other changes – which refers to the deliberate misspelling or shortening of words for the sake of simplicity or whimsy. Wanted Words 2 is simple and whimsical, but it's also thought-provoking. As the poet says, no language is neutral.
This is not quite a coffee-table book, and not quite a read-through book. It's more the kind of book that lives on the kitchen table for a time, to be picked up and flipped through over breakfast cereal. Appropriately, there is no word to describe this phenomenon.
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