Helen FieldsScience Writer

When I first got to Japan and started learning Japanese, I used a dictionary that wrote out all the Japanese words in roman letters. Loyal readers of Dictionary of the Week may remember it as one of the first dictionaries to be featured: Langenscheidt Japanese. It was a great dictionary for a beginner, but, as I said in that entry, eventually I got sick of having to look things up in our alphabetical order. So that led me to my tiniest, and most-used, Japanese dictionary: Sanseido’s Daily Concise English Dictionary.

When you’re looking Japanese words up in dictionaries, you really need “ga” to come right after “ka” and “do” right after “to.” You know, the natural order of things. What? This order is not intuitive to you? Well, let me explain.

The sounds in Japanese are syllables made up of a consonant (usually) and a vowel. Within each set of syllables, the order is a i u e o (“ah ee oo eh oh”), and then each set starts with a different consonant sound. The sets are ordered a, ka, sa, ta, na, ha, ma, ya, ra, and wa.

But then some of those consonant sounds can be altered. So か makes the sound ka, but if you put two little marks on it, it makes が, which is ga. Same for き ki and ぎ gi, こ ko and ご go, etc. If you put the little marks on the た ta-characters, they become the だ da-characters. The さ sa family becomes ざ za, and the  は ha family has two alterations – the little marks make ば ba, and a little circle makes ぱ pa.

A lot of those are pairs of related sounds, which I didn’t realize until I studied Japanese and noticed that I couldn’t always hear the difference between k and g. If you don’t know which you heard, it’s much easier to look up both “kakkou” and “gakkou” if they’re right next to each other than if one of them is in the G’s and one is in the K’s.

So, once you have the alphabetical order down, you can use this dictionary. Of course, most Japanese words are actually written in Chinese characters, but you look them up in the dictionary by sound. The Chinese characters are given first in the entry, like this, for “tenshuu”: “てんしゅ 天主 the Lord.” You need the characters to distinguish it from “てんしゅ 店主a shopkeeper.” (One is the master of heaven; the other is the master of a store.)

This dictionary is a lot less useful for going from English to Japanese. Say you look up the word “dictionary.” Here’s what it will tell you: 辞典. Good luck figuring out how to pronounce that. Better to wing it: “You know, the book? And it has words? Many words? Japanese, and English, too? Both?” Sometimes I would look a word up, then show the entry to the person I was trying to talk to, but this only works if they have their reading glasses on them.

As with so many of my dictionaries, I have no idea where this one came from. I suspect a used book store or a friend…it was published in 1990, and I think it was probably well-loved before I got it. Oh, hey – it has the price “6.75″ written on the inside front cover, which means I got it at a used bookstore in the U.S. on one of my trips back for grad school interviews. Nice.

This dictionary’s service didn’t end when I left Japan. I’d relied on it for so long, and I wasn’t ready to let go of my Japanese life yet. I carried it in my bag for months after I moved back to the U.S. in 2000.

So one day that fall I was sitting with a new grad school friend in front of the campus bookstore at Stanford. Some guy came by and gave us t-shirts advertising bigwords.com, a textbook seller that apparently still exists – wow, what are the chances? Anyway, the t-shirts all had big words on them. Mine said “coruscant.” Neither of us knew what that meant, but I pulled out my Japanese dictionary, and it came through! It defined “coruscate” as ピカッと光る, which is a totally cute definition. The Webster’s on my shelf gives the accurate but boring “to give off flashes of light; glitter; sparkle.” Sanseido’s definition translates as “light up, like, ‘peekah’!”

Japanese is adorable – onomatopeia for everything. More on that later.

Dictionary Stats: Sanseido’s Daily Concise English Dictionary

date: 1990
publisher: Sanseido
editor: 宮内秀雄 (I’m not going to put money on it, but I think his name is Miyanaka Hideo or, in Western order, Hideo Miyanaka)
length: 1264 tissue-thin pages
guide words on p. 381: でんきうなぎ 電気鰻 an electric eel. てんじゅ 天授の sacred; gifted by nature.
up-to-date-ness: The map of Europe on the inside front has one Germany (thumbs up) but also one Yugoslavia (uh-oh) and one Soviet Union (oh dear).
useful extras: Many appendices for the Japanese person who wants to excel in English, such as translations of the names of Japan’s government agencies (原子力安全 Nuclear Safety Bureau), metric conversion tables, instructions for writing letters in English, and a chart converting Japanese dates to regular dates. (Showa 1 was 1926 and so on.) Gosh, I’d forgotten about that. I used to know what year it was in Heisei.
obscenities: Yup! And they do not hold back. The really rude ones are in here.

I got this brilliant piece of mail the other day:

If a place near my house has been picked for the Washington State quarter, there is something seriously wrong. News flash: Washington, D.C. is not in Washington State.

I’m in Colorado this weekend with my parents and brother, so the Dictionary of the Week is a special guest. What’s What: A Visual Glossary of the Physical World is on the shelf of the vacation rental place where we’re staying, along with such literary selections as The Story of Little Black Sambo and Bride of the Far Side.

This book sounds promising. But it turns out to be…kind of lame. It’s just a bunch of black-and-white pictures with the stuff in them labeled. For example:

I’m just not sure how it improves my life to know that the little thingy that holds the parts of a stapler together is called a “hinge pin.” And if there is anyone in the world who needs to know the names of the various bits of a paperclip, I bet they already know them.

On the inside front cover flap, the book says it’s trying to keep you from having to fall back on “such multisyllabic catchalls as ‘whatchamacallit,’ ‘thingamajig,’ and ‘whoosiwhatsis.’” But those words are really very useful. If I said to you “The actuating lever knob broke off my pencil sharpener,” you wouldn’t have any idea what I was talking about. For one thing, who still owns a desk-mounted pencil sharpener? And also, words are only useful if both participants in the conversation know them. I’d be displaying much better communication skills if I called it “the little knob thingy on the end of the, like, lever thing you use to get it to attach to the table.”

Have you ever heard anyone call the middle of the tomato a “placenta”? Yeah, neither have I.

Also, it’s cut off here, but one of the lines pointing at the lettuce says “leaf.” Ohmygosh! That’s what that thing is called? Why didn’t anyone tell me?!?

The entries don’t explain what anything is for, either – just the names. My dad’s ruling on this dictionary, with which I agree: “Useless.” It seems like it should be kind of fun, even if it’s not useful, but it’s mostly just kind of perplexing. (The Amazon reviewers disagree with me, so maybe you should buy one of the used copies and see for yourself.)

Bonus: The book has a page titled, I kid you not, “Cowboy and Indian.” There’s a paragraph of text on Indians with such useful facts as “Many decorated their faces with war paint prior to battle.” Then the entire native population of North America is visually defined by this inset at the bottom of the page:

Dictionary Stats: What’s What: A Visual Glossary of the Physical World

date: 1981
publisher: Hammond
length: 565 pages
guide words on pp. 192-193: Jacket and Pants (including “padded shoulder”and “elasticized waist”); Blouse and Skirt (including “turn-back cuff” and “dirndl skirt”)

Why do mosquitoes buzz in people’s ears? I actually can’t remember the conclusion of that children’s book, but I can now tell you a bunch more about mosquitoes buzzing in general. It’s in this ScienceNOW story. Enjoy.

For the study, the researchers recorded the sound mosquitoes’ wings make. They needed the mosquitoes to fly in place. The paper just said the mosquitoes were tethered, so of course I had to ask how.

So, in case you ever need to know how to put a mosquito on a leash, here’s an excerpt from my interview notes with Gabriella Gibson, who’s been studying mosquitoes for 30 years:

“You warm up a wire with something like a soldering iron – a very thin wire with a little loop on it. You dip it in some melted beeswax, and you dip it on the back of the mosquito, which you keep cold by slopping it on a block of ice, and then it just sort of melts onto the back of the mosquito. About a minute later, it’s fine and flying away. You can stop it from flying and keep them kind of calm by just putting a piece of tissue paper touching their legs. If their legs let go, they start flapping their wings. We had a little rig so we could lower them down so they could rest a bit. We could give them a little piece of cotton with a piece of sugar water – they stick their feeding parts into it.”

Then she told me she once used a fine piece of silk thread instead of a wire and took a mosquito for a walk. (It flew, she walked.) I’m not sure if there was a scientific reason for that or if it was recreational. Anyway: this is someone who knows how to handle a mosquito.

Three observations on Langenscheidt, the publisher of two of my Dictionaries of the Week thus far (German) (Japanese):

1. I defy you to type “Langenscheidt” without messing up and typing “edit” instead of “eidt” at the end. I have to backspace and fix it every time.

2. I got all excited when I went to Munich and saw the big Langenscheidt “L” on an office building. Ok, that’s more about me than about Langenscheidt. I’m a nerd.

3. They also publish lots of maps, including the ADC street maps of the Washington area, which have been getting me places since 1985. Thanks, Langenscheidt!

At the time I left for Germany last July, I owned three German dictionaries. One I got in 1990 when I took my first German class, one random paperback of unknown provenance, and a big desk dictionary I got a few years ago when I was taking another German class and learning big words. And I had access to another – my dad has a tiny pocket one from, oh, probably the 1960s or so.

Any of these would have been excellent choices to take along. So which of these dictionaries did I take with me for two months in a country where I only kind of speak the language and might benefit from having a dictionary to help me learn new vocabulary?

None of them. That’s right. Not one. I think I figured I would just use the online dictionary Leo. Because my fantasy version of Berlin apparently has free wi-fi raining from the sky and little elf helpers who walk around carrying your computer for you.

I got to Germany and quickly realized how dumb I was. Leo was indeed handy at home and at work, but was no darn use at any of the other places I might see or hear German words, like on billboards or in a biergarten or in a book I was reading on the bus. I could have paid for a data plan and used the mobile phone version of Leo, but…it was a lot cheaper to buy a new dictionary. Besides, I clearly don’t own enough dictionaries already.

Berlin is pretty much drowning in foreigners, so the big bookstore I went to had a large English section. Two of the many German-English dictionaries were pocket-sized: a Langenscheidt and an Oxford. (Actual pocket, not Oxford “pocket.”) I picked up the Langenscheidt and opened it to the last page of the K’s. The last entry was “KZ nt <-s, -s> abbr –> Konzentrationslager HIST concentration camp.” That was not an abbreviation I knew, and it seemed useful. I checked the Oxford. It didn’t have KZ, and my mind was made up.

A few weeks later, I took the dictionary along to a concentration camp. Sachsenhausen, just north of Berlin, opened on July 12, 1936. In the beginning it mostly held political prisoners and criminals; later, that expanded to include Jews, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others, many of whom were deported east to concentration camps or extermination camps in Poland. (Map.) Until I started visiting these places, I didn’t realize there was a difference between concentration camps and extermination camps. People died in concentration camps. There were executions, epidemics, medical experiments, starvation, torture. Countless prisoners were worked to death in factories. But the extermination camps like Treblinka and Belzec and Sobibor and Auschwitz-Birkenau were different. They were just for killing. (Auschwitz was actually a network of almost 50 camps; Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, had the big gas chambers.)

After the war, Sachsenhausen was in the Soviet occupation zone, and eventually East Germany. The Soviets kept political prisoners there until 1950. Later in the 50s, it was turned into a museum, but with a decidedly communist point of view. A larger-than-life memorial sculpture shows a Red Army soldier standing in solidarity with two prisoners he’s just freed. During the time when the countries were separate, this area was used as a backdrop for rallies. The East German government positioned itself as the true enemy of Nazis. They called the Berlin Wall the “Anti-Fascist Protection Wall.” Keeping those nasty West German fascists out, you see. A concentration camp must have seemed like a good place to talk about how much better they were than the other side.

Dictionary Stats: Langenscheidt Universal German Dictionary

date: 2002
publisher: Langenscheidt
length: 608 pages
dimensions: 4½ by 3¼ by 1¼ inches. Still kind of big for most pockets, but perfect for the purse.
guide words on pp. 196-197: Preiselbeere f cranberry; Pulverschnee m powder snow
obscenities: Yes! Interesting – the other Langenscheidt dictionary I’ve written about, this one, didn’t.  My mother asked why I include this in the dictionary stats, so here’s the reason: I think it’s interesting to see whether or not editors include “bad words.” Is the dictionary reflecting the full range of the language as spoken?