Author tells how words defined her
As punishment for acting out during class, a 10year- old Jamaica Kincaid was forced to read John Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”
“I fell in love with Lucifer,” the author joked recently at a sold- out L. A. Public Library ALOUD program “Empire of Words: An Unsentimental Journey to the Birth of the OED.”
In fact, the reason Kincaid writes long sentences, as critics seem to complain, was because during her childhood on the Caribbean island of Antigua she read three books at a young age: “Paradise Lost,” the King James Bible and the Oxford English Dictionary.
“My mother gave me a concise copy of the Oxford English Dictionary, and I read it like a book,” she said.
Sarah Ogilvie, Stanford linguistics lecturer and author of “Words of the World: A Global History of the Oxford English Dictionary,” shared stories of her time as chief editor of Oxford Dictionaries, where she had access to the archives that showed how the dictionary was conceived. Volunteer readers, she explained, were asked to go through their reading libraries and mail in slips of paper with English words they wanted to be included in the dictionary.
“It was very interesting for me to see how men and women responded differently to the words they selected,” Ogilvie said.
For instance, a male reader of an African travel journal submitted words such as “table” and “chair,” but the woman reading the same book selected more exciting words.
Kincaid concluded that because women’s lives were much more confined at that time, it made sense for them to be attracted to more exotic, adventurous words. She recalled being attracted to the word “gloaming” in a copy of “Jane Eyre” when she was 10.
“It was such a foreign concept. Gloaming,” she said. “There is no gloaming in the Caribbean. It’s just night or day. That’s it.” She found a way to incorporate the word in her writing when she was 28 years old.
Ogilvie said Kincaid is quoted in the latest version of the Oxford English Dictionary 14 times for the use of words that are particular to the Caribbean, such as “soursop,” and antiquated British words, such as “wanton,” in reference to music or color.
Even “sublime” has a different connotation for Kincaid. “‘ Sublime’ was something awful,” she said, “even terrifying. Not the way people use it now.”