Helen FieldsScience Writer

I was inspired to start writing about dictionaries when I needed my Italian dictionary to check a word in something I was editing. So that little green paperback gets to kick things off as the inaugural Dictionary of the Week. I apparently bought the Collins English/Italian Italian/English Dictionary for $2 at a used bookstore, but don’t ask me when or where. Probably sometime in the last few years, when I decided you could never have too many dictionaries for random foreign languages, especially random foreign languages that you speak a little.

“Speak” is a strong term for what I do with Italian. More like “Could form a sentence…more than a decade ago.” When I was living in Norway, I made plans to travel through Europe with friends after I finished my year in Trondheim. Our itinerary included a few weeks in Italy, but none of us spoke Italian. So I thought, what the heck, I’ll take an Italian class. I already knew a little from singing, and I’d had classes in French and Spanish, so I figured it wouldn’t be too hard.

Taking a foreign language class that is taught in a different foreign language is pretty trippy. I don’t know if you’ve ever taken a foreign language class populated mostly by adults, but you’re pretty much guaranteed to get at least one student who is there for the purpose of rattling on in English about the last time he was in the country where the language is spoken and carrying on protracted discussions on unimportant points of grammar. This class had that, except the guy was Norwegian and talked fast. And just to make things harder, I think the teacher might have been Swedish or something.

I arrived a bit early before the last session and sat on a bench in the sun – spring had finally come after the long, dark winter. A guy from my class with a giant moustache (a Trondheim specialty) joined me. We chatted a bit and he was totally impressed when he realized I was American – he was like, but I never even noticed your accent in class! Your Norwegian must be amazing! I explained that he’d actually just never heard me speak Norwegian – rather than trying to handle multiple languages at once, I ditched the one I’d learned first and turned my brain over to Italian. Which means I turned my brain over to sentences like, “What is your name?” and “I’m a student, and you?”

I discovered when I got to Italy that my Italian was surprisingly serviceable. My great triumph was when I ordered a taxi by phone one night and it showed up in the morning at the time we wanted it. Crazy!

The word I needed the dictionary for last week was lira. I figured it meant “lyre” (it was being used in an early music context) but I thought I should check. You might also recognize it as the word “lira.” You know, the currency. Hey, they don’t have lira anymore! That’s a funny thought. No more paying 4,000 currency units for a cup of coffee!

I was reading about lyres in Italian because I was editing the program for the Christmas Revels, which has an Italian Renaissance theme this year. Buy your tickets now! I’m pretty sure the program alone is worth the ticket prices, which are as low as $18 adult and $12 youth. But if the outstanding program notes aren’t enough for you, there will also be singing, dancing, some kind of Italian musical instrument I’ve never heard of (dictionary says: zampogna sf instrument similar to bagpipes), and really all kinds of wonderful entertainment and happiness. It’s set in Leonardo da Vinci’s workshop, so hey – there are inventions, too.

Dictionary Stats: Collins English/Italian Italian/English Dictionary

date: 1983 (the pages are quite yellow)
publisher: A Berkley Book, published by arrangement with Collins publishers
length: 407 pp
letter quirks: WXY are all combined in the Italian listings, with only seven words: watt, whisky, xeres, xerocopia, xilofono, yacht, and yoghurt, which is translated as the excessively voweled but, according to one of my English dictionaries, technically correct “yoghourt.”
guide words on p. 173: spettinare (vt: ~ qb to ruffle sb’s hair); spogliare (vt to undress)
obscenities: Heck no! Geez, not even “heck” is in there. (Also not listed: “geez.”)