Make Mine Dry

Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence. Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend. There are periods in the most thrilling day during which nothing happens, and though we continue to exclaim, "I do enjoy myself," or "I am horrified," we are insincere. "As far as I feel anything, it is enjoyment, horror" - it's no more than that really, and a perfectly adjusted organism would be silent.

- E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

A few weeks ago we grew weary in the Lounge of the fickle weather on the East Coast this winter and spring, and decided that a change was in order. So, leaving only a bookmark in our place, the Loungeurs up and left for the New Mexico desert, where one of our aunties lives. The change of scenery was just what the doctor ordered and we quickly settled into the prevailing milieu of cacti, mesquite, and hardscrabble shrubs like Mormon Tea and greasewood.

Using only minimal powers of observation, we quickly absorbed the critical, all-pervasive difference about life in the desert. It's dry. The lack of water defines desert life to an extent unimaginable to wetlanders like us: the air is dry, the soil is dry. The river and creek beds are dry. Our sinuses were dry. The abundance of visible life in the form of greenery that arises from the dependable presence of moisture is missing here.

Aunt Euphemia came in one afternoon, her arms full of dry-cleaning, and found us all puzzling over a rather dry crossword. "Lively bunch here," she remarked dryly, as she sashayed over to the liquor cabinet and poured herself a dry martini.

"We were going to unload the dishwasher but the dishes aren't dry yet," I explained.

At this point, our sensors began to vibrate, as they normally do when a linguistic peculiarity arises. What is dry up to, anyway, with so many jobs to do in English? Or put another way, why, given the basic job it has to do, have we given it so many others? Our desert getaway quickly became a busman's holiday, as we brought up the Visual Thesaurus to see what we could find out.

The word map presented by dry (and we turned off the nouns and verbs, feeling that the adjective alone presents enough material for study) is, at first glance, not a picture for the faint-hearted. However, if you put your cursor on the first definition in the scroll box, you'll see that all of dry's literal work is somewhat separated - off to the left in the map, with about a dozen hangers-on. What we're curious about is, why all these other meanings? Does it arise naturally, for example, that dry can mean both ironic and nonsweet? Where did it all begin? To answer this question, we went to the mother of all English dictionaries, the Oxford English Dictionary, for a little historical detective work.

Dry has been around in English as long as any word you that might pop into your head; in fact, only a few hundred words in English are older. Dry shares an etymon (a common ancestor) with drought, just as wet (which we'll look at in a moment) does with water. Here's a rundown of the various shades of dry, presented in order of their first recorded appearance in English:

A curious thing here, to our minds: first, many of the figurative meanings of dry arose quite early in the word's history, suggesting they were natural metaphors for most speakers and writers. Secondly, so many of the meanings of dry are negative, denoting the lack of something usual, desirable, or essential. Here's our five-cent theory: dryness (along with drought) are implicitly understood as undesirable, abnormal conditions, while the presence of moisture is more or less taken for granted where there is life. So it falls naturally to dry to attract meanings indicating deviation from normality.

By way of comparison, we thought we'd have a gander at wet: it's the first antonym that comes to mind in relation to dry, although dry has many other opposites, according to context: sweet, flowing, lactating, submerged, and sober, etc. Wet is pretty much equal in terms of vintage - both adjectives have their first citations in the year 888, according to the OED - yet it has developed far fewer figurative senses than dry. As you can see from its word map, it hasn't got all that much to do once you take away the many synonyms for drunk.

On a hunch, we took a peek at our lists of the frequency of words in English (see below), and sure enough, the figures bear out the sense inventory numbers. Both wet and dry are in the basic vocabulary of English - the top 2000 words in terms of frequency: dry comes in at spot 746, with wet at 1311. These figures, however, include all uses (that is, all parts of speech) of both words. When considered as adjectives only, dry drops into the 1700s in frequency, while wet is at around 2500. The upshot: folks find occasion to note something as dry about 30% more often than they note that something is wet.

At this point, we were ready to launch an extended philosophical discourse, declaiming about why we thought that wet, often denoting the natural state of things, should be less frequent and less polysemous than dry. But Aunt Euphemia would have none of it; she had already dry-mopped the kitchen floor and was now noisily munching on some dry-roasted peanuts, having drunk her cocktail dry. Having lived long in the desert, she strikes us as being the "perfectly adjusted organism" that Mr. Forster describes in the quote we started with, and she prefers that others behave as if they were. So we just settled into the prevailing dry atmosphere, and said no more.

If you're a collector of word lists, like the Loungeurs are, you'll find a handful worth downloading free at

http://www.sequencepublishing.com/resources.html

including one of the lists we used as a basis for determining the frequency of wet and dry.

If you want to consult the mother of all dictionaries on a particular word matter, you'll have to have to fork over a hefty subscription fee, but check with your local library: many US, and soon nearly all UK public libraries will provide access to the online version of the OED. It's at

http://www.oed.com/

Finally, whether you've read A Passage to India or not (here in the Lounge we revere E. M. Forster as one of the Gods of Fiction), you might enjoy this review, contemporaneous with the 1924 novel, from the Guardian:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/classics/0,6121,99926,00.html