Learning to Speak, Part Five

V.

     Xiaolu Guo's novel, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers, can set us writhing and twitching with thought. For this is a novel, unlike all the others, that is written as a dictionary.

     Still, Guo and her novel novel are not the only reason to twitch, or to think. A small, nervy cadre of past dictionaries and other dictionaryesque books might tempt almost as much: The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce; The Dictionary of Received Ideas by Gustave Flaubert; The Jazz Dictionary by H. L. Mencken; Rational Meaning by Laura Riding Jackson; The Secret Lives of Words by Paul West.

     Recent manifestos of conscious word-mongers have also found publication. This past year alone has seen the issuing of The Secret...