Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Borges Bakhtin and the OED

If Jorge and Mikhail had their way the OED would not merely cite every representative use of a word throughout history; it would cite every actual iteration, showing the differing nuances of meaning that emerge and accrue (or diminish or turn aside) a necessary correlate of the absolute uniqueness, the unrepeatability, of every moment. It would also there cite every quotation of every iteration, every undergraduate's particular reading and reciting of Hamlet, excluding only misuses, misunderstandings and misreadings but including the use of every word in a definition in the OED.

If you add Derrida to the dictionary you'd have to include in the already infinite book every misreadings and every misspeaking as well.