print previewback BRIAN CULHANE
The Oxford English Dictionary
While some struggled to return from the war,
Others found refuge in pigeonholed words,
When the occasional surcease in sleuthing
Opened a path which had a momentary end:
The way Tolkien, laboring in the W’s, brought
The magnifying glass at his eye to one walrus—
Tusked, blubbery, whale-horse athwart a floe.
In a crabbed hand, he wrote hrosshvalr,
Old English source if “zoologically improbable.”
Jamieson, keeper of the Skerries Lighthouse,
Contemporaneously reported a beast “yawning
During its sleep” and “quite tolerant of ladies.”
Fresh from no-man’s-land, the lexicographer
Dug trenches through Germanic tongues,
Having walnut behind him and warlock ahead.
And we? Waterboard. Weaponize. Worse. 
Imperium: A Bedtime Story
The Oxford English Dictionary