North York Central Library Blog

Do you have a list of books you want to read? I will never finish mine, because I’m always adding to it. And if, by some
miracle, I come to the end of it, there are plenty of list books I can
consult, such as, 1001 books you must
read before you die, or 500 essential
cult books: the ultimate guide, or, Science fiction: the 101 best novels, 1985-2010, etc. It‘s good to know I’ll never run out of things to read, but sometimes
I feel the urge to go
rogue. That’s when I visit the ‘New Books’ shelf here in the Language, Literature and
Fine Arts Department at North York Central Library, and let my eyes wander until something attracts them — cover art, title, book blurb — I never know what will
hook me.

On my latest trip to the shelf of discovery, I was attracted
by a green washed aerial view of a tidy suburban scene. The book was called The slippage, by Ben Greenman. The gap
between the perfect vision of suburbia on the cover, and the slide toward
failure implied by the title enticed me to read the first sentence: “William had told the Kenners not to worry
if they were a few minutes late, and he was foresuffering the moment when he’d
have to reassure the Fitches that it was okay to be the first ones to arrive.”

The word ‘foresuffering’ pushed a mysterious button in my
brain before librarian-me could intervene, and a strange chuckle sound came out of me.
A browser nearby sent me a disapproving look, which changed to confusion
when they saw my staff badge. I could guess what they were thinking: the
librarian should be shushing the chucklers, not doing the chuckling.

I was hooked. It was the idea of suffering in advance, of
pre-suffering, or anticipatory suffering that
did it. But suddenly I grew suspicious. Is it even a word, I wondered? I’d never come across it. I consulted various dictionaries. It wasn’t in Merriam-Webster’s, Collins or Gage. Did Mr. Greenman slap ‘fore’ and ‘suffering’ together to make a new word? I’m no grammarian, but I don’t think you can just plunk ‘fore’ onto anything you want, even though it’s a prefix– if such plunking were allowed, you could foresprinkle, foreguzzle, forecuddle, forepickle, and more. I put it to the final
test: the
twenty volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary. In volume 6,  I found a long list of weird ‘fore’ words, including: fore-boasted, fore-weep, fore-thwart, fore-utter, fore-sing, fore-smell,
fore-suspect, and fore-littering (as in giving birth to
puppies prematurely, not being irresponsible with garbage too soon). And — hold onto your hat — foresuffering was there!

I’ve got a surprise for my fellow word nerds — you have access to the online version of The Oxford English Dictionary
with your library card! The “OED” functions like any dictionary — it gives you the meaning of words. But it’s also a historical dictionary — with it, you can'trace the history of individual words through quotations from classic literature, cook books (or ‘cookery books’ to use the OED term) and more. This is far more entertaining than it sounds. Take a look at one of the quotes found under the entry for ‘ballyhack’, which means hell: “Damn it! I wish this laughing hyena was in ballyhack!” Consider the reek of tragedy foreshadowed in the quote from The history of the kirk of Scotland that accompanies the entry for ‘fore-smell’: “Manie of his servants forsmelling danger, left him.” The easiest way to get to the OED online is to type “Oxford English Dictionary” into the search bar on the Toronto
Public Library webpage and click on “access online”.

As I checked my book out, I thought
about that moment when one is hooked by a book. I’d been hooked by a paragraph
before, and even a sentence. But this was the first time I’d been hooked by a single
word.

“Mr. Greenman,” I wanted to say to the author, Jerry Maguire style, “you
had me at foresuffering”.

If you ever get to the end of your reading list, consider picking
up one of these books to get some ideas.