The Broken Teaglass (7 page)

“Office poll,” I heard him say to Cliff.

“Brew-scetta,” Cliff said.

“Office poll,” George continued at another cubicle.

“Brew-shetta,” a confident male voice replied.

I put away the
editrix
and
blow-dryer
cits. Clearly idiots like me had no business wasting time around a place like this. I took out the next cits in my box for the
Supplement. A
suffix,
-aster
. I’d never heard of it before. I’d had enough of suffixes for the morning. I stuck it back in the box and pulled out the next batch of cits.
Asterisk
. Grand. I was beginning to feel nostalgic for
asswipe
.

Ten after ten was when the
ten-minute break time started. At 10:09, Mona peered into my cubicle, resting her little pink chin on the cubicle wall.

“Having fun?” she asked.

“Yeah—I mean, not exactly.” I closed my motorcycle magazine. “I’ve been reading this magazine for thirty minutes and all I’ve underlined is ‘rice rocket,’ which is apparently an un-PC term for sports bikes from Japan. And honestly, I don’t think ‘rice rocket’ is ever going to make it into the dictionary.”

“Just underline it and move on with your life, Billy. You’re thinking about it too much. Whether or not it’ll make it in later isn’t the point. You want to take a walk for the coffee break?”

“Sure.”

Once we were outside, cutting across Samuelson’s front lawn, she said, “I don’t suppose you’ve come up with any brilliant ideas about those cits yet.”

“Nope.” I paused to suck in the crisp fall air. It annoyed me that this beautiful day was occurring right outside of the Samuelson office, just out of reach from my cubicle. “I’ll come running if I do.”

“Good. I’m looking forward to it.”

“So what are you working on right now?”

“Nothing. Taking a morning break from defining. They gave me some proofreading to do on the update of that kids’ thesaurus. Mindless.”

“Huh. I haven’t gotten anything like that yet.”

“Oh, you will.”

“So … what’s up with that George guy?”

“What do you mean?”

“What’s this ‘bruschetta’ office poll?”

“Oh, George does that once in a while. He’ll probably do it a lot more now that we’re working on the
Supplement
.”

“Shouldn’t he be able to determine how things are pronounced on his own? I mean, based on the evidence?”

“It’s just, sort of, for his own clarification,” Mona said. “Especially if it’s some new foreign borrowing, like a food word. He wants to see how your average educated Americans are saying it. Here he has a roomful of relatively educated people at his disposal.”

“All right. But what if we’re all saying it wrong?”

“If we’re all saying it, it’s probably not wrong, exactly. Just Americanized. If no one is saying the real foreign pronunciation, it’s probably not going to enter the language that way.”

“That just doesn’t sound like a very reliable method.”

“Well, you know, George doesn’t have as much citation evidence as we do for his work. Usually the only person who ever thinks to take regular pronunciation citations is the pronunciation editor. Have you seen the pronunciation cit file? Only a few drawers. He has to use a variety of sources to make his decisions. There are probably some tough calls. I think he usually uses the office poll to decide whether to take a variant seriously. Like, say he’s got some evidence that people are starting to say
fajita
like ‘fa-jee-ta.’ Of course it seems completely dumb to someone like him.
But maybe he’ll do an office poll. If ten out of thirty or so educated people are saying ‘fa-jee-ta,’ maybe there’s something to it. Maybe it’s becoming an accepted variant.”

“Is that a real example?” I asked.

“Of course not. I don’t think anyone in the office would say ‘fa-jee-ta,’ do you? I just heard some girl say it at Taco Bell the other day. Which is what made me think of it.”

“You eat at Taco Bell?”

“Yes. I’m tired after work a lot. And I’m not much of a cook, I’m afraid.”

“You shouldn’t eat too much fast food. It fogs the brain.”

“Fogs the brain?”

“Well—it fogs
my
brain, I think, but probably you don’t need to worry. I’m just a little bit of a food snob, that’s all.”

We walked on in silence for a few minutes, heading down a street behind the Samuelson parking lot. A woman started yelling something incomprehensible at us from the third-floor window frame of what appeared to be a gutted house.

“What?” I yelled back.

“Just keep walking, Billy,” Mona said.

“Think again!” the woman called. She undid and then refastened her graying blonde ponytail with an elastic band.

“Sorry?” I yelled. As soon as I’d said it, I realized she wasn’t talking to either of us.

“Not the kind of woman you want around your kids,” the woman shouted. “Not if you want them to turn out
right!”

“Oh,” I called, quickening my pace to catch up with Mona.

“You didn’t want to stop and hear the whole story behind that one?” I asked her.

“Did
you?”
Mona replied.

“Not by myself,” I said.

Mona put her hands in her skirt pockets as she walked.
“Yeah, this is kind of an odd little neighborhood. A dictionary publisher parked himself here in Claxton in the 1800s, and come hell or high water, the dictionary’s gonna stay here in this neighborhood. No matter what depressing socioeconomic phenomena have grown up around it.”

“It really doesn’t seem so bad,” I said. “No worse than the neighborhood I live in. I think it’s cool. This place has history
and
a little hardened modern-day reality to it.”

“Can I ask you a personal question, Billy?”

“Sure.”

“Do you still, um, have both of your parents? And are they still married?”

“Yes … and yes. Why?”

“I can usually guess these things, based on little impressions. You can kind of tell these things about people, if they give the right signals.”

“You had a sort of sixth sense that my parents are still kicking, and still married?”

“Not a sixth sense. Just a hunch. Based on certain psychological vibes.”

“What about birth order? Can you guess that too?”

“I’m not as interested in that one. And I’m not as good at it. But I think you’re the youngest.”

“Very impressive. But how many siblings do I have?”

We were approaching the Samuelson walkway. Mona stopped walking, put a finger over her lips, and studied my shoes, then my knees, then my chest. While she tapped her finger and considered her answer, I looked at the Samuelson building. It still jazzed me to approach the place on foot. Coming from the gray, depressed outer neighborhood, it was always surprising to come upon this building, with its manicured lawn and little front garden. The squat brick structure looked like a venerable old elementary school. An
etching of the company building appeared on the front pages of some of Samuelson’s older dictionaries, and the outer appearance of the place hadn’t changed much since then. Coming in the front door, I always felt like I was entering that old drawing. The back entrance, with its parking lot and Dumpster, had never seemed as romantic.

“Two older sisters,” Mona said carefully.

“Wrong. But close. One older sister.”

“Okay. Well, that’s interesting. Is she much older than you?”

“Two years.”

“What does she do?”

“She’s a grad student. But she identifies herself as a poet. That’s what she wants to be when she grows up, I guess. She’s already gotten some things published in a couple of obscure literary magazines.”

“Really? What kind of stuff does she write?”

“Long poems. Sort of historical stuff. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s been a couple of years since she’s showed me anything. Rumor has it she’s working on a series of poems about the Hartford witch trials of the 1660s. My parents mentioned she was doing some research on that.”

“Wow,” Mona said. “A research-poet. Sounds pretty classy. I don’t even have any full siblings myself. All half-siblings and step-siblings.”

As Mona talked she led me up the Samuelson steps.

“Hmm,” I said. “Can I ask
you
a personal question?”

“Sure.”

“Do you floss regularly?”

“Oh dear. That
is
personal.”

“Well?”

“I wish I were better about that. I tend not to do it.”

“Interesting,” I said, nodding.

“Why do you ask?”

“There’s a fundamental difference between flossers and nonflossers,” I said.

“And what’s that?”

I hesitated before answering.

“Flossers don’t really think they’re ever going to die,” I said, holding the door for her.

“Really?” she said. “Wow. It sounds like I gave the right answer, then.”

I’d have preferred we didn’t end the conversation there, with my morbid dental hygiene theory just hanging in the air. But before I could say more, she gave me a little wave and headed back to her cubicle, where she could think about how creepy I was for the remainder of the morning.

Back at my desk, I pushed
all of my cits aside and took out my dictionary.
Blow-dryer
. I considered the word again as I flipped to its page in the book. What was so special about
blow-dryer
?

The definition was just a cross-reference to
hair dryer
. Simple enough. I flipped to
editrix. A
female editor. I pored over these definitions for a few minutes. They really didn’t seem to have any obvious connection. I wondered if the same person who wrote the citations could have also written these specific definitions. It didn’t seem possible, though.
Editrix
seemed like an old-fashioned word. It had probably been around for a while. I looked at the date next to the definition. 1950. Surprising, I thought. I’d have thought it a nineteenth-century sort of thing. And who knows when it had actually entered the dictionary? If the first known use was in 1950, it probably hadn’t been defined and entered in a Samuelson book until at least the mid-1960s. At least.
Maybe not until the 1980s. I’d have to look back at old editions of the Samuelson books to know for sure. Maybe someone was just playing around with the random lot of words they had defined themselves. I flipped back to
blow-dryer
and looked at the first usage date.

1950.

“Crikey,” I whispered. Clifford’s chair creaked, registering that he’d heard me.

I slammed my dictionary shut and ran to Mona’s cubicle.

Access time. Advantaged. Airglow. Alphanumeric
.
These
were the first words on the list Mona printed out from the digital dictionary. All words first used in 1950. All she had to do was type
1950
into the Date search field, and in a few seconds, we had a list. My favorites on the list were
head-shrinker, LSD
, and
X
(as in the movie rating). As we huddled together in the downstairs editors’ library, I suggested to Mona that we try looking up those words first.

“Be my guest,” she said. “But I plan on going about this in an orderly fashion. I say we split the list into parts and check off words as we go. But if you want to reserve a few particular words for the titillation factor, don’t let me stop you.”

“Yeah, okay. Maybe I’d like ‘corn chip’ too,” I said, looking at the list. “But maybe I’m just being greedy.”

“Whatever.” She gazed at the list, then asked, “What are you doing Friday night?”

“That’s tomorrow night.”

“Yes.”

“What are you proposing? Taco Bell?”

“We get a pizza. And some beer, maybe. And we knock off a few solid piles of cits at my place.”

“You’re gonna bring cits home? Is that allowed?”

“No one’s ever forbidden it, actually. And we’ll put them right back on Monday. I’m always taking big piles of cits from the files to answer letters and stuff. Sometimes they stay at my cubicle for weeks. Nobody cares. Nobody notices.”

“And you’re buying beer? I thought you didn’t like beer.”

“I don’t. I’m bribing you.”

“Well, that sounds good. But what do
you
drink?”

Mona paused. “I don’t need to drink. Someone’s got to hold this operation together.”

“Come on, now. What do you like to drink? Satisfy my curiosity. Wine coolers? Berry-flavored ciders?”

“No,” Mona snapped, looking insulted. “Mixed drinks. Cosmopolitans. Whiskey sours. Rum and Coke. But Coke will be sufficient this time.”

“All right. I’m buying the Coke, then. Which cits do you want to take?”

“How about you start with ‘access time’ through ‘cable knit.’ I’ll start with ‘maître d’ ’ through … let’s see … through ‘noseguard.’”

“That’s gonna be a lot of cits. Am I supposed to carry a big sack of them out on Friday afternoon?”

“Bring a backpack Friday. And just take as many as you can without it looking too weird. You might also try to look through some of the words before you leave work. What kind of beer do you like?”

“Hmm. Corona, if you feel like classing it up. But lately I’ve discovered I have a taste for Black Label. If you’re looking to save a buck or two.”

“It’s all the same to me, Billy. Really, which do you want?”

“What the hell. Black Label.”

Mona rolled her eyes. “That’s what my dad drinks with his hunting buddies. And I think you may be the only Black Label–guzzling lexicographer on God’s great earth.”

“I don’t
guzzle.”

“We’ll just see about that. I’m going back up to work.”

“Congratulations,” I said.

I was thinking of the pile of cits on my desk for
astern
. Sitting next to it was a letter questioning the political propriety of the term
little people
. The writer of the letter felt the term was really no better than
midget, dwarf
, or
munchkin. The
writer gave no indication whether he was a “little person” himself.

“I’m just gonna hang around here for a few more minutes, and look at the old books,” I confessed.