Who told you that your story doesn’t matter?
FROM THE IDENTITY ISSUE 2024
By Bridget Ryan Snell
My family is a word-loving bunch. My father and sister listen to a linguistics podcast together— that’s where we learned to pronounce fracas correctly and to avoid old-fashioned phrases, and all that jazz. We enjoy words we heard from our Opa and Uncle Jim because yelling them is cathartic (though we’re not entirely sure they’re words). We hang on to a long-lost cuss and antiquated curse when we find them. I am a something-th generation Irishwoman and was raised in the Catskills. This means I will use those curses when provoked and swallow the consonants at the end of each word. I’m also the third of four daughters, which means it’s likely no one ever heard me cuss.
When Janet Bibeau at Storybook Cove in Hanover, MA (my favorite Independent bookstore and a new columnist in PCS) recommended “The Dictionary of Lost Words” by Pip Williams, you bet your sweet bippy I took it home. This work of historical fiction goes into the pages of the Oxford English Dictionary as it was constructed by Sir James Murray and his team of male lexicographers. The story is told through the eyes of a young girl, growing up motherless amongst these men, and discovering that men and women live in the world quite differently. She collects from the office floor the words these men throw away and deem unimportant. The reader begins to ask the right questions: What qualifies a word as unimportant and who decides? What happened to all of the #lostwords?
I haven’t a clue.
When I speak with groups around the South Shore about the importance of personal storytelling, I remind each woman that her story is part of a collection that shapes history. I have been asked, “Who would want to hear my story?”
I do! Also, who told you to question if your story is important?
If I ask the question, “What was it like growing up in 1960’s in America?” I’m going to listen to your experience. If I ask, “How did you get here and will you stay?” I’m going to wait for your story, not listen to the rhetoric. If you tell me “I Am a Woman” then I cannot argue.
If I don't hear everyone’s truth, then am I getting the whole story? Ask Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Marsha P. Johnson, and Meliva Merić Einstein.
Our pages hold history that you didn’t learn from a textbook; Real stories of racism, gender identity, immigration, love, and aging. Today, if you keep reading, you’ll learn new meanings for “fight,” like fighting addiction and fighting cancer. We learn the meaning of being led by deep faith and being misled. Our newest columnist, Sam Correia, introduces LGBTQIA+ voices from the past. They bring us voices in a community once lost in history. A history that once rejected their identity.
Anyway, at first blush, you may think I have a grudge against the OED or Sir James Murray. I do not. I did not know him, his 11 children, either of his wives, the way of the world as he lived it, nor his view of the world. But if I had been able to know him, I would ask him for his story, not the story someone else wrote about him and decided what I should know about his life. I think he would like to be asked. Don’t you want to be asked?
