FROM:
Someone
Page 1,876
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary
Rainy, Big Fat World
A Rainy Day
TO:
Whomever
Page Whichever
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary
Rainy, Big Fat World
A Rainy Day
To Whomever May Be Interested in Some Words and Rain,
I hope the puzzle pieces fit together.
Whoever thought up the idea of writing a dictionary deserves daily kudos for their ingenuity. The dictionary is like a mother or a soft bed or hot chocolate – it’s what you turn to when the puzzle pieces just don’t fit. Or when you’re lazy: “disliking physical or mental exertion.”
But look at this… After the definition of lazy in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, several phrases are listed in which it is commonly used: “lazy summer day,” “lazy weather,” “lazy chair.” Funny, that while reading the definition of such a motionless word, the tendrils of one’s mind begin to run out and away with the static recognition of familiar circumstances.
And then the puzzle pieces always fit, even if they fit in such a way that the history paper you were lost on suddenly makes sense and now you have to spend an hour changing your answer to reflect your newly acquired genius on the exact definition of some word like bureaucracy.
Dictionaries are the perfect supplement to a rainy day. On rainy days you often feel small, like all the clouds in the widening sky and the millions of raindrops and the sheer power of our planet’s weather could just swallow you up without anyone’s notice. J.D. Salinger says in Catcher in the Rye: “It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road.” For someone who is often stopped short by the knowledge that there’s just so much knowledge and so many things in the world, those words express that sensation of insignificance when faced by the all-encompassing weather of the world.
Dictionaries are big, generally. You can have pocket dictionaries, or keychain dictionaries, but they generally have a “big” connotation in our minds. They’re big and fat, like the world, or like a “Love It” serving of ice cream from Coldstone Creamery. But unlike the world or ice cream, dictionaries are contained. They’re limited. They have a beginning and an end. They’re constant.
One of the definitions of rain that arises after the obvious ones is: “to occur in a multitudinous onset.” What a multitudinous (“existing in or consisting of innumerable forms, particles, elements, or aspects,” which in this case would be syllables) word multitudinous is, especially for a dictionary to use in a definition (“to determine, bring to an end, explain”). How, when I just looked up two words to comprehensively explain the meaning of another, can that bring the word rain “to an end?”
Anyway, back to rain: isn’t it true, though, that if this multitudinous onset is rain, that life equals rain? And maybe that’s why we feel so swallowed up every time it rains, because it’s like life is staring us in the eye saying, “You’re just another thing to be multitudinously onset upon?” Or is this multitudinous onset, as it exists in innumerable forms, another way of saying, “Wow, look at all the innumerable forms of things that can rain down on you? Isn’t this all so wonderful, this diversity of onsets?” Is there any way to really pin down what the multitudinous onset is and what it means for all of us, unless you were to look up every word in its definition…and still, would that bring you to an end? Eventually, maybe. But it would be more like bringing you back to a beginning.
Just like now, when all this looking up and interpreting and explaining is leading me back to one, simply complicated conclusion: Life is a dictionary that eventually comes to an end by wandering off on courses affected by multitudinous onsets and invariably cycling back to the beginning.
I hope the puzzle pieces fit together to whomever may be interested in some words and rain.
Multitudinously yours,
Someone Who Is Interested in Some Words and Rain
P.S. Sometimes life gets complicated and doesn’t make sense; just like this wouldn’t have if I’d put it in one of the previous paragraphs. But this coincidence is just too awesome: one of the examples for the uses of multitudinous is, “urgent demand upon my attention made by the multitudinous world around me – Richard Church.” And another: “the long multitudinous rain – Carl Sandburg.” Just goes to show the interconnectedness of words.
P.P.S. As I am someone who is interested in some words and rain, and therefore am also a “whomever” who is interested in some words and rain, I hope just as much that the puzzle pieces fit together for me as well as for whomever else may be interested in some words and rain. Sometimes they don’t.
P.P.P.S. Thanks Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, you 2,662 page hunk of multitudinous-y life.
By Mollie G. Greenberg
