Phil Cousineau - Wordcatcher: An Odyssey Into the World of Weird and Wonderful Words

Table of Contents

I am awed by Phil Cousineaus scholarship and the overall view he has of inner matters. He has a genius for the soulful dimensions of words, and a rare intelligence for communicating the numinous dimension of language. Wordcatcher will grace the lives of all who read it, and inspire them to respect, even revere words as much as its author does.

Robert A. Johnson, author of He, She, and Slender Threads

Phil Cousineaus Wordcatcher is a wonderful meditation on words that can be read from beginning to end if you are obsessed with speech, greedy for mountain air, and into enlightened verbal play. Not a dry lexical listing, each word Cousineau chooses sings with cellos, vagabonds through tongues and history, and bounces like a balloon on the moon, and as high as his quirky imagination takes us. Compelled reading for residence in the ancient synagogue of the word.

Willis Barnstone, author of The Restored New Testament and Ancient Greek Lyrics

BOOKS BY PHIL COUSINEAU

The Heros Journey: Joseph Campbell on his Life and Work 1990
Deadlines: A Rhapsody on a Theme of Famous Last Words 1991
The Soul of the World: A Modern Book of Hours (with Eric Lawton) 1993
Riders on the Storm: My Life with Jim Morrison and The Doors
(by John Densmore with Phil Cousineau) 1993
Soul: An Archaeology: Readings from Socrates to Ray Charles 1994
Prayers at 3 A.M.: .: Poems, Songs, Chants for the Middle of the Night 1995
UFOs: A Mythic Manual for the Millennium 1995
Design Outlaws: On the Frontier of the 21st Century (with Chris Zelov) 1996
Soul Moments: Marvelous Stories of Synchronicity 1997
The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seekers Guide to Making Travel Sacred 1998
Riddle Me This: A World Treasury of Folk and Literary Puzzles 1999
The Soul Aflame: A Modern Book of Hours (with Eric Lawton) 2000
The Book of Roads: Travel Stories from Michigan to Marrakesh 2000
Once and Future Myths: The Power of Ancient Stories in Modern Times 2001
The Way Things Are: Conversations with Huston Smith on the Spiritual Life 2003
The Olympic Odyssey: Rekindling the Spirit of the Great Games 2004
The Blue Museum: Poems 2004
A Seat at the Table: The Struggle for American Indian Religious Freedom 2005
Angkor Wat: The Marvelous Enigma (photographs) 2006
Night Train: New Poems 2007
The Jaguar People: An Amazonian Chronicle (photographs) 2007
Stoking the Creative Fires: 9 Ways to Rekindle Passion and Imagination 2008
Fungoes and Fastballs: Great Moments in Baseball Haiku 2008
The Meaning of Tea (with Scott Chamberlin Hoyt) 2009
City 21: The Search for the Second Enlightenment (with Chris Zelov) 2009
The Oldest Story in the World: A Mosaic of Meditations on Storytelling 2010
Wordcatcher: An Odyssey into the World of Weird and Wonderful Words 2010
Atonement: The Next Step in Forgiveness and Healing [forthcoming]
Who Stole the Arms of the Venus de Milo? [forthcoming]

The Korean Brush

In Eric Partridges book The Gentle Art of Lexicography, there is a story about an elder lady who, on borrowing a dictionary from her municipal library, returned it with the comment, A very unusual book indeedbut the stories are extremely short, arent they?

Henry Hitchings, Johnsons Dictionary

I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of the earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.

Dr. Samuel Johnson, preface to the Dictionary

You know well that, for a thousand years, the form of speech has changed, and words that then had certain meanings now seem wondrously foolish and odd to us. And yet people really spoke like that, and they succeeded as well in love as men do now.

Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, 1372

n. 1594. Act of acknowledging influences; a token of due recognition or appreciation; a favorable notice; an expression of thanks. Its roots reach back to the Medieval English aknow, from the Old English oncnawan, to understand, recognize, know, and the old verb knowlechen, to admit, especially the truth.

If asked how long this book took to write I would have to say its been in the works all my life, so my first acknowledgment goes to my parents, Stanley and Rosemary Cousineau, who imbued in me the discipline of consulting dictionaries and encyclopedias whenever I had trouble with my boyhood studies. For better or worse, Ive been in thrall to words ever since. While still in my teens I was blessed with an offer to work at my hometown newspaper, the Wayne Dispatch, where Id appear every Thursday night to put the paper to bed, and its to Roger Turner, my first newspaper editor, Id like to offer a token of recognition for that blazing red pencil that sent me scurrying to the dictionary. A nod of deep appreciation is also in order to the late Judy Serrin, my journalism teacher at the University of Detroit. Writing this book revived a dormant memory of how she began the first class each year with two simple questions: Who reads the Op-Ed pages? Who reads the dictionary? After seeing all the blank stares, she would ask, How else are you going to learn to think for yourself ?

As sure as heliotropic plants turn to the sun for light, so does the logotropic soul turn to words for illumination. In that light I would like to acknowledge with a raft of favorable notices my early lorefathers, the mentors who reminded me of the love of learning, the animateurs, Joseph Campbell, Huston Smith, and Robert A. Johnson, all of whom contributed words to my vocabulary, such as metaphor, cornucopia, and numinous. I would also like to broadcast my thanks to Ernie Harwell, the Detroit Tigers Hall of Fame broadcaster, who illuminated for me the origins of boondocks, a word I learned from his home run calls on WJR, the sound of the Motor City. Thanks to Jeanne and Michael Adams for their offer of the use of Ansels cabin in Yosemite, where I found the rest and respite to finish a large portion of the book, and discovered the wonderful citations for beauty, camera, and scootch in Ansels well-thumbed library. Others who have shown special fellowfeel for this project over the years include County Clares own favorite son, P. J. Curtis, who helped clarify several of the euphonious entries from Ireland, such as cant and cahoots, and my logodaedalus Dublin friend Jaz Lynch, whose use of the old term kibosh caught my attention at McDaids Pub in Dublin many years and many pints ago. The versatile wordmonger R. B. Morris supplied me with the marvelous Tennessee riff on help and hope and true companionship over the years as we discussed the imponderabilia of language in bars from Knoxville to North Beach. To the late Frank McCourt, I want to acknowledge the