The politics of wordplay

Samuel JOHNSON’S “Dictionary of the English Language” essentially spawned the form. It’s not that there were no dictionaries prior to Johnson’s; dozens had appeared in the 150 years before his book was published in 1755. What these proto-lexicons lacked, however, was an appreciation of the nuances of language, the way words and usage evolve through the refining filter of daily speech. If Johnson’s dictionary has a lesson, it is that language is organic, a living thing, and words and how we use them become a window on our time. His dictionary “provides a record of a fascinating age,” notes Johnson scholar Jack Lynch. “It was the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and the time of Ben Franklin’s experiments with electricity. Britain’s Empire was expanding as its colonies in America were beginning to show signs of discontent. [It] is a portrait of that rapidly changing world.”

This notion of engagement, of the dictionary as a scrapbook of its culture, is very much at the heart of “The Future Dictionary of America,” the latest project from McSweeney’s Books. Edited by Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers, Nicole Krauss and Eli Horowitz, it functions in its own way as a speculative riff on Johnson, in which writers and artists collectively seek to reinvent the language, offering a vision not of English as it exists but as it might one day become. The conceit is simple: The editors want us to imagine that we are reading at some point in the future, when (according to the book’s jacket) “all or most of our country’s problems are solved and the present administration is a distant memory.” That gives “The Future Dictionary” an air of whimsy, of conjecture, but at the same time an introductory note informs us that it “was conceived as a way for a great number of American writers and artists to voice their displeasure with the current political leadership, and to collectively imagine a brighter future.... Thus, all proceeds from the sales of this dictionary go directly to groups devoted to expressing their outrage over the Bush Administration’s assault on free speech, overtime, drinking water, truth, the rule of law, humility, the separation of Church and State, a woman’s right to choose, clear air, and every other good idea this country has ever had.”

The idea of a dictionary fulfilling a political purpose may seem a stretch, but language -- like most human endeavors -- is inherently political, loaded with markers of privilege and power. For proof, just look at any campaign speech or the latest bulletin from the Department of Homeland Security. These writers mean to re-appropriate the language, to reprogram it. Often, this takes the form of puns or neologisms, plays on words that have as much to say about our current moment as the brave new world this book purports to represent. Kurt Vonnegut recasts “rumsfeld” as a common noun meaning “one who can stomach casualties.” Katha Pollitt evokes a phenomenon called “the Rupture,” defined as “the collapse of the religious right following the failure of the so-called Rapture to occur on January 1, 2023, as predicted by Rev. Tim la Haye Jr; any big entirely predictable disappointment; a foolish conviction that ends in embarrassment; a fanciful misreading of the Bible.” There’s a wishful quality to many of these definitions, an almost palpable sense of yearning, as if imagination had become our last refuge. Others are simply funny, like Brian McMullen’s “spunctual” (“excited, on time, and excited to be on time”) or Art Spiegelman’s “Puritangential” (“a form of argument used to obfuscate an important issue by diverting attention to an irrelevant one”).

Not every entry is a neologism. Some writers take a familiar word or phrase and give it a new context or form. Colson Whitehead offers this spin on “body bag”: “an artificial skin worn as punishment by perpetrators of hate crimes. I was pretty screwed up, but after walking around in an African-American body bag, I see the world in a whole new way.” Peter Carey reinvents “humvee” as “a war criminal, first used in 2010 U.N. trial of former Vice-President Cheney (the Hum-V.P.), but later applied to anyone corrupt or self-serving”; Sue Halpern frames “Utilitarianism” as “a now-discredited political doctrine first espoused by Lord Haliburton in the late 20th century, and widely popular in fin-de-siecle America, based on the notion that what is good for the biggest private utility company is good for all.” In places, the commentary can get a little cloying, not because of the politics but rather from the constant references to an idyllic future, in which the ills of the present have been miraculously healed. When it comes to imagined futures, after all, there are plenty of bleak ones -- just read “A Canticle for Leibowitz,” “Riddley Walker” or Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron.” Nevertheless, it’s profound to see so many writers get inside the language and use it as a vehicle for critique. That’s a point Vonnegut makes in his essay “Cold Turkey,” which appears in its entirety as a coda. “Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey,” he writes. “And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.”

What’s important about such a statement is that it links the future America of this dictionary to the present, and in so doing reminds us of how directly language can reflect our lives. This, in turn, brings us back to Samuel Johnson, who also saw language as a mirror, an expression of our values and beliefs. Like Johnson’s dictionary, “The Future Dictionary of America” is very much a writers’ book -- or, more accurately, an artists’ book, since it includes a 12-page insert of color art by, among others, Saul Steinberg and Chris Ware, as well as a 22-song CD featuring the likes of Tom Waits, R.E.M., Elliott Smith, Sleater-Kinney and David Byrne.

At heart, though, it’s the words that matter, that reveal the essence of the work. Some of the finest material here is the least expected: the extended tale of urban life with which Diane Ackerman explicates her entry “citytime” or Shelley Jackson’s series of ingeniously linked definitions that together trace the history of the ISA, or Interstitial States of America, also known as the Dewey States, an “entire second America” that exists in the theoretically infinite space between cataloged library books. It’s another leap, the dictionary as extended fiction, but what it really offers is a sense of possibility. Or, as Jackson puts it: “[I]f every book had a unique call number, and there were infinite call numbers, then there must be infinite books still to be written (in which case the world was not in such immediate danger of total destruction as one might have imagined from contemporary evidence).” *