The Broken Teaglass - Emily Arsenault

The Broken Teaglass taught me more about the work behind revising and updating dictionaries than I'd ever imagined I'd want to know. That might sound rather dull, but it was actually pretty interesting. The idea that people have to constantly comb through magazines or books looking for new words, or new usages of preexisting words. How recent certain words or phrases are ("cop out" was apparently first noted in the early 1950s). Having to deal with people calling or writing, wanting to know why a certain word isn't in the dictionary, or can they use this word this way?

Well, that last part sounds maddening, but I've always known customer service wasn't the career path for me. The book's about more than that. Billy's just started working at Samuelson Company, Mona's been there a year. While looking through the citations for various words, they find an unusual one, credited to a source called "The Broken Teaglass". No such story can be found anywhere. Soon, more citations listed as coming from it are found, each one far wordier than necessary, each numbered, each one an excerpt from the same story. A story that seems to take place at Samuelson, and seems to involve a dead body. And some of the principals may still be around.

There's a bit near the end where Billy confesses he hates the word "closure". Mona replies that he shouldn't hate words, he should hate the people who misuse them instead. Perhaps overstated, but an effective point. One of the things the book seems to point out is that language is only constrained by us. By how we choose to use words, or not. By the things we hold back, or that hold us back. The words to express what we mean are there, and if they aren't for some reason, we could make them up. It's pointed out, anything can be a word, as long as you can utter it and make others understand what it means. Shakespeare created the word "moonbeam", because there were things he wanted to say the current vocabulary was inadequate for. Ideally, we should never have trouble saying what we mean, but we do, for reasons that have little to do with words, and everything to do with us. It's pretty obvious laid out like that, but I hadn't ever considered it that way, likely because I don't tend to think a lot about words or their origins. I'm thinking about it from the other end, the personal side, why someone can't get the words out, or what the right words are.

The book zips by, except I hit a slight bump between pages 100 and 150. At that point, the book was in danger of veering into tediously familiar territory, and I was dreading it. Then Arsenault surprised me, and continued to do so throughout. The manner in which the story Billy and Mona find was broken up among the citations encourages them and us to jump to conclusions, which are eventually blown up as more citations are discovered. It's an effective technique.