Today’s episode is guest hosted by Jason Schneiderman.

Transcript

I’m Jason Schneiderman and this is The Slowdown.

I love dictionaries. I love words, obviously, and how could I love words and not love dictionaries? Dictionaries hold all the words that ever were, while telling you all the things a word has ever meant, sometimes they even tell you how a word came to mean what it means. I’m not always so aware that my relationship to dictionaries is more, um, let’s say passionate, than other people’s relationship to dictionaries until something happens that reveals it to me.

For example, a relative once asked me about whether the word “ironic” could mean something bad, or annoying. I replied that I had actually just looked up the word “irony,” and that the usage panel had split over whether or not the word “ironic” could be used to describe human foibles or failings. So, I explained, while the usage panel unanimously agreed that rain on your wedding day is not ironic, half of them felt that the firehouse burning down could accurately be described as ironic.

My cousin’s response was not what I expected. “Usage panel?” he said. “What’s a “usage panel”?” I explained that some dictionaries assemble well-regarded writers to weigh in on controversial uses of language. Then I was about to start recounting an amusing anecdote from the introduction to the dictionary where all of this had been explained. But I stopped myself, thinking that maybe I should not mention that I had been reading the introduction to the dictionary.

Today’s poem uses the form of a dictionary definition the way other poems use the form of the sonnet or villanelle. Instead of starting with a highly technical and specific word, like “irony” or “cardiovascular,” Phillis Levin starts with the seemingly simple word “Part,” a common word that, it turns out, can mean many things.

Part
by Phillis Levin

Of something, separate, not 
Whole; a role, something to play
While one is separate or parting;

Also a piece, a section, as in
Part of me is here, part of me
Is missing; an essential portion,

Something falling to someone
In division; a particular voice
Or instrument (also the score

For it), or line of music; 
The line where the hair
Is parted. A verb: to break

Or suffer the breaking of,
Become detached,
Broken; to go from, leave,

Take from, sever, as in
Lord, part me from him,
I cannot bear to ever

“Part” by Phillis Levin from MERCURY © 2001 Phillis Levin. Used by permission of Penguin Random House.