'A Wodge of Once-Treasured Values'

One of the reasons we read is to learn new words and new uses for old ones. The process that started when I was four years old – deciphering marks on a page – will never be completed because deciphering is the simplest and least rewarding part of reading. Think of English as a vast collective undertaking, infinitely supple and forever mutating, and one into which we are born, effortlessly. It’s a gift. I remember the title of a paperback popular when I was a kid: 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary, originally published in 1942. It’s still in print and has sold millions but that’s not what I’m talking about. The book’s premise is utilitarian, almost mercenary. The co-author, with Norman Lewis, was Wilfred Funk, heir to the dictionary dynasty. The book’s opening sentence suggests its premise: “Your boss has a bigger vocabulary than you have” -- a laughably false assertion. 

I’m thinking of something less marketable and more fulfilling. Take wodge, not a typo for wedge. I came across it in an essay by L.E. Sissman, “I’ll Never Go There Anymore” (Innocent Bystander: The Scene from the 70’s, 1975):

“[Y]ou will find a wodge of once-treasured values and illusions filling the trash barrel in the back of my car on the way to the dump. In their place I hope you will also find one new-minted curmudgeon, older, sadder, slightly wiser, and with, on the whole, a hell of a lot better idea of what to do with the rest of his life than he ever had before.”

The sad epilogue is that Sisson died the year after Innocent Bystander was published, killed by the Hodgkin’s disease first diagnosed in 1965. From the context, wodge is probably still cryptic. The OED labels it “British colloquial” and gives this definition: “a bulky mass; a chunk or lump; a wad of paper, banknotes, etc. Hence also: a huge amount, a lot.” Among the citations is one from a letter written by Ezra Pound and, from 2008, a usage in the Bath Chronicle: “The National Archive . . . has released a mighty wodge of documents chronicling sightings of so-called UFOs over the UK.”

Sissman’s theme is how aging empowers one to suffer fools less gladly: “If age is enfeebling (and it is), it’s also liberating in a curiously parallel way. Age frees you to contemn, to cut, to ignore, precisely because it deprives you of tolerance, stamina, bonhomie. At forty-five [!], one is no longer constrained to stand for hours at a party in the company of a notorious gasbag.”

And that includes gasbags with a pinched and endlessly recycled fund of words. Give me a wodge of words.