Thinking Before Your Box’s Time

Phoenix Rising: Stressed Writer’s Com...

Thinking Before Your Box’s Time

One of the reference sources I have on my desk is an old dictionary. It is so old, the pages aren’t yellowed, they are brown. I can’t find a printing year on it, but it boasts that it is a Home dictionary that is “a book of general reference, pronunciation, etymology, explanation, phrases, synonyms and appendices.” It has no less than eight coloured and 570 black and white illustrations, plus right in the back it has a very handy reference as to the “formal modes of addressing persons of title etc.” This includes Baronets and Knights, who obviously, I bump into often. Plus how to address the Royal Family and Bishops Suffragan. Sorry, what?

Does this book sound too quaint to be useful? I believe that my learned colleagues at ANTHONY HORDERN & SONS, LIMITED, NEW PALACE EMPORIUM, SYDNEY (yes, they shout at you a lot), would disagree. If nothing else, it certainly is a reminder of how dramatically times have changed. The book is probably around one hundred years old. I love it because it has great words you don’t often see any more. Such as contretemps. A contretemps is an unexpected or embarrassing event.

"While I live, I'll grow." Anthony Hordern & Sons was Australia's largest retailer from the late 19th through to the mid-20th century.

I originally held onto the dictionary as I went through a period of reading historical fiction. Some of the words weren’t in a regular dictionary and I had no idea what they meant. Google hadn’t been born yet, so without the Messrs Hordern I would have been in the dark. The reason why it now has a place on my desk? I find it inspirational. It’s not just for thinking outside of the box, but for thinking before the time period my box lives in. I love original words and titles. Old dictionaries are a great place to find them. Not to mention, if I ever come across a Bishop Suffragan, I’ll know what to do.

If you write fantasy, you may want to get to know what a cartulary is. (I’m not telling… go have fun finding out, you may discover other goodies in the process.) If you write historical works, then discovering what a quaestorship is could be helpful. Oddly enough, while I am on that page, a quaich or quaigh is “a small drinking vessel with two ears for handles.” Yes, it says ears. I’d like to know whose ears? Horror writers, have fun with that one! Just don’t ask me to read your work before bed or eating.

Many of these words are sending my spell checker into a frenzy of confusion. If you would like to give autocorrect a complete nervous breakdown and expand your horizons, have a look at Project Gutenberg’s work at http://www.gutenberg.org/ Project Gutenberg takes out of copyright works and puts them online free for anyone to read. You can get them as ebooks for Kindle, epub, .txt or .pdf. They have facilities for mobile devices. It’s worth a look. They cover humour, satire, reference, gothic fiction, military, Dante, Dracula, fiction for clergy, Danish fairy tales, erotica, ghost stories, historical works, socialism, time travel, ancient history, philosophy, poetry, detective and fantasy stories, romance… you get the picture! It’s a treasure trove for writing ideas and great reading.

I like Anthony Horden and Sons’ motto: “While I Live, I’ll Grow.” The more you read, the more you grow and the better you write. As you add to what you know, your creativity has far more to draw on which can take you down paths you’d never discover otherwise. As you accede to the gladsome delights of these exemplary assets, may your exploration make the profundity of your literary divagation more jocose.

P.S. Don’t overdo it with the fancy words! It’s taken me twice as long to write that last sentence as it did to write the whole post… I’m still not sure the word use is correct.

This article is Copyright Cate Russell-Cole 2012. It may only be reproduced, with my permission, for non commercial purposes only. My name and Copyright must remain intact. For permission, please email me at: cate@virtual-desk.com.au