Oh No! Dictionary Prints

OH NO! WORDS

Artist's Statement

I have often wondered why some authors apologise for using difficult and forgotten words. To me, the experience of the languages I speak is like travelling through the landscape I grew up in, the landscape I love and know so well. The trees and plants are mostly familiar to me, but every now and then I spot a rare and curious species. It usually makes me stop dead in my tracks and makes me reach for my camera and identification manuals. When I read a text and I see a word that I have not yet encountered, I get thoroughly excited. I believe that there are those who get really annoyed.

I wrote my first dictionary in 1977 – DICTIONARY OF COLOUR. Since then I have written quite a number of them. The biggest one, with over 18,000 entries, was completed in 1999 – A DICTIONARY OF PERPLEXING ENGLISH. In order to compile this dictionary I spent nearly four years, carefully reading page for page the seventeen volumes of the proper OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY. I made careful notes on all the words I usually found puzzling and obscure and turned them into dictionary entries. I tried to give each word a 'face' so that it might become endearing and desirable. I gave its meaning/s, wrote a little of its etymology, related anecdotes and gave examples of its usage. I have often worked with the extinction of plants and trees in my artworks and in a way I am trying to save old and difficult words from vanishing.

I have not yet published my dictionaries as books. Instead I turn them into artworks, shown at exhibitions. In a way, exhibiting artworks is 'publishing' them or making them public. In my BLIND ALPHABET PROJECT, for example, I have created a dictionary for blind people to walk around in. The 'pages' are really metal bases with knee-high wire-mesh boxes concealing wooden sculptures that cannot be seen by sighted people. Blind people find the boxes or 'pages' conveniently accessible in rows, next to each other and do not have to look for them. The sighted are made to feel somewhat blind by the frustrating gallery signs that say "Don't touch." The Braille plates on the boxes discuss strange words for shapes, structures and textures – a dictionary of morphology. To date I have made close to 400 of these three-dimensional 'pages'. The Letter 'A' forms chapter one. Chapters two and three comprise the letter 'B' and can be seen in different locations. Nine 'chapters' of THE BLIND ALPHABET 'dictionary' have been completed and can be viewed in different countries and cities.

The OH NO! DICTIONARY is a collection of strange words from some of my existing dictionaries, namely :
DICTIONARY OF PERPLEXING ENGLISH
BEYOND THE EPIGLOTTIS
DICTIONARY OF -OLOGIES AND –ISMS
VISUUM AND TUTAMINA OCULI
DICTIONARY OF MANIAS AND PHOBIAS
OH NO! DICTIONARY OF ITCHY CUM SCRATCHY
OH NO! DICTIONARY OF RED NAMES
OH NO! DICTIONARY OF UNMENTIONABILIA
OH NO! DICTIONARY OF PLACES MOTHER MIGHT NOT APPROVE OF

The OH NO! in the title plays on my fascination with words and names that create an incredulous or surprising reaction. One might be taken aback when hearing a really shocking place name like 'Fucking', a town in Austria or 'Shit', a small town in Māzandarān, Iran. The involuntary reaction would be to say "Oh No!"

To celebrate my OH NO! DICTIONARY, I made word 'drawings' that were 'translated' into 'text' by my daughter Karen Boshoff. These are called OH NO! WORDS and feast on the craziness of eight intriguing words that exist in the OH NO! DICTIONARY.

Willem Boshoff 2010