Fraternity-Testvériség, 1965 (43. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1965-03-01 / 3. szám
FRATERNITY 5 DICTIONARIES (FROM THE BOOK OF “BEHOLD YOU AND ME”) By Sándor J. Bako On the shelves of libraries lie a quantity of books — thick volumes and slim booklets containing only a few pages, costly editions richly ornamented and modest publications, antique moth-eaten books and quite fresh topical notes, still sticky with printers’ ink. They all have a theme, literary or technical. Their style is sometimes colorful and instructive, sometimes artistic and metaphorical or dryly eliminating misunderstandings, sometimes enigmatically complicated or surprisingly simple. The contents and style of the books decide their category, according to which they can be classified. There are books that form a special class which can be neither compared nor confused with the others. They are called dictionaries. Dictionaries are in no way artistic. They are merely a huge storeroom for bricks, representing the building material of the language. Out of that raw material, scientists, writers, philosophers and poets form the eternally valuable construction of human civilization. Dictionaries, like writers naturally endowed with genius, speak only of fundamentals and say “mother”, “child”, “home”. Everything else for them is superfluous. During its evolution, the human spirit liked basic facts, without being interested in precedents and consequences. Dictionaries contain all knowledge which the human brain has ever produced. They know all ideas, feelings, longings and passion which from the very beginning of time were born in human hearts, and yet they are quite modest and absolutely neutral. In spite of the eloquence, based on the knowledge of scarcely calculable power of expression, they are and remain mute, and never have an opinion of their own. They appear to be conscious of the fact that nothing on this earth is so perishable, ephemeral and relative as the meaning and value of human words. Precisely for that reason, dictionaries never discuss, but only reveal without ceremony. This is the reason that they never have to correct, justify or deny their statements. They merely say: “grain of dust”, “universe” — and then become silent. The silence of dictionaries exasperates men and makes them nervous. Why? Just for this reason, that dictionaries indicate only the names of things, only the essence of ideas, without any reference whatever to the relationship between them; and they do that with the indifference of a surgeon, who dissects the human heart, brain or kidneys,
