LUM’BER, n. [allied to Sax. leoma, utensils, or to lump, clump, a mass, or Dan. lumpe, a rag; lumperie, trifles; Sw. lumpor, rags, old cloths; D. lomp; G. lumpen; Fr. lambeau. In French, lambourde is a joist.]
1. Any thing useless and cumbersome, or things bulky and thrown aside as of no use.
The very bed was violated—
And thrown among the common lumber.
Otway.
But Webster adds the woody meaning that was by then widespread in the U.S. and Canada:
2. In America, timber sawed or split for use; as beams, joists, boards, planks, staves, hoops and the like.
Webster was prone to fanciful etymology, and we should be careful not to be swept away by it; still, his hint that the American and (French-)Canadian logger’s meaning of lumber could be related to or influenced by the French word “lambourde” (joist) is more helpful than the entry in The Oxford Dictionary of English Eytmology (1966), which doesn’t attempt to explain the transatlantic shift of meaning at all; and it has more pith than the conjecture offered by Joseph T. Shipley, in his personable Dictionary of Word Origins (1945), which seems a little too neat:
In American pioneer days, when the land was cleared for farming, there were many felled trees lying around; these, being discarded material, were lumber—which later was put to good use.15
American writers from time to time use the word in the English way (Poe, in his “The Rationale of Verse,” wrote that metrical quantity “is a point in whose investigation the lumber of mere learning may be dispensed with, if ever in any”); but the reverse is seldom true: Adam Smith is the only writer from Great Britain I can come up with who used our sort of lumber several times.16 In The Wealth of Nations (1776), he writes:
In a country quite covered with wood, where timber consequently is of little or no value, the expense of clearing the ground is the principal obstacle to improvement. By allowing the colonies a very extensive market for their lumber, the law endeavours to faciliate improvement by raising the price of a commodity which would otherwise be of little value, and thereby enabling them to make some profit of what would otherwise be a mere expense.
Incidentally, the Poe and the Adam Smith I found by searching the Library of the Future CD-ROM, Version 3, which gives forty-five competent lumberians (not Alexander Pope, though), from Harriet Beecher Stowe (“The garret of the house that Legree occupied, like most other garrets, was a great, desolate space, dusty, hung with cobwebs, and littered with cast-off lumber”), and Oscar Wilde (“The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life,” says Lord Illingworth, in A Woman of No Importance; “The old are in Life’s lumber-room”), to Johann Wyss’s Swiss Family Robinson in translation (“The stairs served afterwards for a kind of lumber-room”).
Webster’s Second (1934), the dictionary Nabokov loved, includes the obsolete pawning sense of lumber as its first definition for the word; its one quotation comes from the prologue to The Scarlet Letter—
The heap of Customhouse lumber. Hawthorne
—which refers to the yellowing documents and the torn piece of scarlet cloth in the second story of the Custom-House that betray Salem’s guilty secret.17 Webster’s Third (1961) scraps the Hawthornian lumber and replaces it with a bit of forward-looking table-thumpery halfway between timber-cutting and encumbrance-clearing—“”—substituting
Dewey because (as Herbert Morton shows in his valuable history of Webster’s Third) its unsentimental editor, Philip Gove, wanted quotations that pulled their weight of definitional meaning, not ones which merely demonstrated that a famous name had employed the word. “The hard truth is that literary flavor in a dictionary quotation represents a luxury of a bygone age,” Gove wrote, heartbreakingly18—and it is true that Hawthorne’s Custom-House context doesn’t get you very far if you don’t already understand what he’s talking about.
Funk & Wagnalls New Standard Dictionary (1963), however, manages to quote Hawthorne19 and convey meaning:
2. Discarded household goods; disused articles put aside.
Happy the man who in a rainy day can betake himself to a huge garret, stored, like that of the Manse, with lumber that each generation has left behind it from a period before the revolution.
HAWTHORNE MOSSES, The Old Manse p. 26. [H. M. & CO. 1891.]
(Notice that Funk & Wagnalls gives specific page references, like the OED. Webster’s doesn’t.) Isaac Funk and his heirs also call our attention to a couplet from Cowper’s “Table Talk” (1782) about poetry in the time of Cromwell:
3. Hence, worthless stuff; rubbish.
Verse, in the finest mould of fancy cast,
Was lumber in an age so void of taste.
COWPER Table Talk 1. 627.
The rest of Cowper’s passage (one of three by him, according to the English Poetry Database, that have lumber in them) is good:
But when the second Charles assumed the sway,
And arts revived beneath a softer day,
Then like a bow long forced into a curve,
The mind released from too constrain’d a nerve,
Flew to its first position with a spring
That made the vaulted roofs of pleasure ring.
(But Cowper is not at all pleased, as he goes on to say, with the “dissolute and hateful school” of indecent poets that surrounded Charles II, by whom he means men like John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, appointed a Gentleman of the Bedchamber in 1665, and author of the most beautiful piece of lumber-poetry extant, which I plan to quote in a moment.)
The last meaning in the Funk & Wagnalls entry, flagged by a dagger to indicate that it is obsolete, is “6†. A pawnshop,” and there follows a generous quotation from Trench’s On the Study of Words about lombard-rooms. Webster’s Third, by contrast, entirely eliminates the debtor-creditor meaning, except to allude to it in a capsule etymology: “perh. alter. of 1lombard; fr. the use of pawnshops as storehouses of disused property.”
Yet Webster’s Third is much better about the modern sense of lumber-room than either Webster’s Second or Funk & Wagnalls: besides furnishing a primary meaning (“a room in which unused furniture and other discarded articles are kept: STOREROOM”), it gives a separate figurative submeaning that includes the following ungrudgingly long but apt citation: “.”
Who was J. L. Liebman? Joshua Loth Liebman was a Boston rabbi and “one of the leading radio preachers in America,” according to the author’s note at the back of his Peace of Mind (1946)—“his sermons over NBC, ABC and CBS coast-to-coast networks have been heard by millions.” He is dead and forgotten now, as so many are. Dead, wee become the Lumber of the World, wrote the Earl of Rochester, around 1674, immortally translating a chorus from Seneca’s Trojan Women:
After Death, nothing is, and nothing Death,
The utmost Limit of a gaspe of Breath;
Let the Ambitious Zealot, lay aside
His hopes of Heav’n, (whose faith is but his Pride)
Let Slavish Soules lay by their feare;
Nor be concern’d which way, nor where,
After this Life they shall be hurl’d;
Dead, wee become the Lumber of the World,
And to that Masse of matter shall be swept,
Where things destroy’d, with things unborne, are kept.20
Rabbi Liebman’s style—psychotherapeutical uplift pitched in an exalted Emersonian key—isn’t easy to skim, but I was interested in his relatively late American use of “lumber room” in its traditional sense, and I didn’t think I could put it to etymological use having only seen it laid out on the sheeted gurney of a dictionary page. That would be lazy; not up to A. E. Housman’s exacting standard. Housman singles out for praise the scholar who is willing to spend
much of his life in acquiring knowledge which for its own sake is not worth having and in reading books which
do not in themselves deserve to be read.
Housman could of course be wrong in his conception of scholarship: Edmund Wilson, who was hit hard by Freud, thought that “there was an element of perversity, of self-mortification, in Housman’s career all along.”21 But Housman’s self-denying intensity appealed to me in my outward-bound lumber-quest. And Liebman certainly qualified as a test of scholarly dedication: his book did not, in itself, deserve to be read, at least as literature. (As self-help, however, it is better written, certainly more allusive, than, say, Deepak Chopra’s Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, which is something.) I spent about two hours paging impatiently through Peace of Mind. I thought—for you begin to develop an instinct for where a sought word can hide when you have looked for it long enough—that my prize would be middened in the section called “Inferiority Complex May Hide Self-Hate.” It wasn’t. I looked for it in the vicinity of “Let us learn, then, not to take the depression of the day or the month as the permanent state of our life.” I expected to run into it as I came to: “When we are tired, every pinprick becomes the stab of a knife and every molehill becomes a mountain.” But I didn’t find it anywhere, and as I scanned steadily, feeling the marshmallow-sized minutes tumble by, occasionally tricked by two nearby words (number and plod, say), which my overeager stare united as the absent object of research—just as in adolescence my eyes would fuse an innocent word on one line (full) with another just below it (knuckle) into a short-lived neutrino of an obscenity that I would invariably hurry back to reread—I became troubled by the knowledge that this was not Rabbi Liebman’s only book: in other words, that I might have to scan Hope for Man or Psychiatry and Religion just as closely; and the suspicion that I was wasting my irreplaceable afternoon of research time got in the way of my attempt to concentrate on what I was looking at, so that several pages would rise in the east and set in the west without my being sure I had properly reviewed them. I flunked this test of scholarship: I couldn’t make myself thoroughly skim Peace of Mind.
I flunked, also, in the case of T. D. Weldon’s Introduction to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which I checked out because Webster’s Third included, as part of its entry for lumber,
—T. D. Weldon>
Here I really tried: I took off my glasses so that I could be on closer terms with the page, and I braked the pace of my scanning by running a fingertip down each margin (the type was small, so it took me about three seconds), but again I kept blanking on the phrase that I was looking for; I had to whisper it to myself to keep my retinas primed for it. As the sense of my fallibility grew, I began to have fantasies of paying Text Busters, a local optical scanning service, the dollar or two per page it would take to put the whole book on a disk so I could search it electronically, even though that would take all the fun out of any finds I would make; and I remembered a New York Times article about Xerox’s invention of an automatic page-turning system for scanners and copiers that employed an electrostatically charged sliding glass plate. Was it true that only the books that didn’t deserve to be read deserved to be scanned, or only the books that did?
T. D. Weldon’s book was not a masterpiece—it was a careful work of explication, not merely a tissue of “useless words,” but not piercingly beautiful, either. George Herbert’s line, about how speech
Doth vanish like a flaring thing,
And in the eare, not conscience ring
chased its tail in my conscience as I skimmed doggedly along, until I realized that for an indeterminate number of pages I had been unwittingly looking for “flaring thing” rather than “worthless linguistic ~.” I didn’t have the fortitude to go back. Nonetheless, although no lumber forthcame that afternoon, I did find this variation on Locke’s dark room passage:
This completes the catalogue of the kinds of furniture which are constantly being conveyed by the senses into the empty room of the mind’s consciousness. (p. 31)
And I found this:
It is unlikely that any philosopher has ever produced a more unutterably tedious work on metaphysics than Baumgarten’s Metaphysica; or combined so successfully the pedantry of a dying scholasticism with the illusory clearness of a pseudo-geometrical demonstration. (pp. 40–41)
How exciting to be given a fresh touchstone of unutterable tedium! Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten it would be, then: I immediately looked him up. His earliest work, a set of poetic precepts and theorizings that appeared in Latin in 1735, was annotated and translated by Karl Aschenbrenner and William Holther in 1954 as Reflections on Poetry. At first there looks to be a sort of lumber-room in it, when Baumgarten discusses the definitions of poem, poetry, and poet: “For rehashing these scholastic terms by nominal definitions, the overstuffed cupboards of the Scaligers, the Vosses, and many others are there to be pilfered.” But “overstuffed cupboards” is only an anachronistic translation of “refertissima scrinia.” A scrinium is a scroll-box,22 or, in Baumgarten’s modern extension of the word, a bookcase. The phrase just means “crowded shelves,” then. Baumgarten does offer, however, a sensible note of warning some pages later:
§76. It is advisable to omit certain elements from a poem, §75. If one were to try to present every interconnection of a historical theme, he might wonder if he should not include a substantial part of the world, not to say all the history of the ages: it is poetic to omit certain details and more remote connections.
And yet if I followed Baumgarten’s advice here, in this non-poem, I would have to leave him out altogether, and that I could never do.
1 Marlowe’s “Infinite Riches in a Little Room” is, by the way, the motto used in a nineteenth-century advertisement for Scribner & Armstrong’s “Bric-a-Brac Series” of literary reminiscences, edited by Richard Henry Stoddard. The ad appears in the back of the American edition of Leslie Stephen’s Hours in a Library, which contains two essays on Pope. Infinite Riches: Gems from a Lifetime of Reading (1979) is the title of a 588-page “garnering” by Leo Rosten, which excludes quotations from poetry, novels, Shakespeare, and the Bible. Under “Books” Rosten offers a précis of a relevant Hebrew legend: “Whenever the shelves in the Library of Heaven were entirely full, and a new, worthy book appeared, all the books in the celestial collection pressed themselves closer together, and made room.” The English Poetry Database is the most efficient compression of the celestial collection yet.
2 Quoted in Norman Page’s A. E. Housman: A Critical Biography (1983), p. 175.
3 Bentley said of Warburton, one of Pope’s early annotators, that he had a voracious appetite for knowledge, but a poor digestion; fifty years earlier Hobbes wrote that “it is an argument of indigestion, when Greek and Latin sentences unchewed come up again, as they used to do, unchanged.” In an Easter sermon in 1619, John Donne said, “The memory, sayes St. Bernard, is the stomach of the soul, it receives and digests, and turns into good blood, all the benefits formerly exhibited to us in the particular.” And Ovid refers to Chaos, embryon Nature, as a “rudis indigestaque moles”—“a rude and indigested mass” in Dryden’s interestingly literal translation, 1693.
4 “His [Dryden’s] mind was growing to the last, his judgment widening and deepening, his artistic sense refining itself more and more. He confessed his errors, and was not ashamed to retrace his steps in search of that better knowledge which the omniscience of superficial study had disparaged.” (Among My Books, 1870, “Dryden.”)
5 Compton’s is also a more intelligently conceived encyclopedia in some ways than the flashier Encarta ’95—if you search for the word “concordance” on Compton’s, you retrieve a passage about Bible concordances; if you perform the same search on Encarta, you get every article that includes the shortened text-string concord: the town in Massachusetts, Henry David Thoreau (who was born there), the supersonic Concorde, and so on.
6 Faulkner in the University, Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, eds., University of Virginia Press (1959), pp. 116–7.
7
Charles W. Crawford wrote a history of the R. F. Learned Lumber Co. as his dissertation for the University of Mississippi in 1968. Though he never went to college, Rufus Frederick Learned, whose father was a lawyer and whose mother ran a boarding school for girls, could easily have known of Pope’s couplet; Pope was a pedagogical staple.
8 Cumulatively reminiscent, perhaps only to me, of the lines
While yet I groped
Within the darkened lumber-room
Of memory
in one of John Davidson’s Fleet Street Eclogues, “Michaelmas” (1893). It’s in the English Poetry Database, Disk 3. Joyce read John Davidson.
9 A mere 20,000 cards shy of the rude and indigested mass of cards that Guy Montgomery produced from all of Dryden’s poetry and plays and left alphabetized but unpublished on his death in 1951. Mary Jackman and Helen S. Agoa used Professor Montgomery’s fearsome legacy to create an early computer-generated punch-card concordance (1957): it may look a little crude, but it’s very useful. It led me to the “machining lumber” in the Prologue to Mr. Limberham (quoted above), which, since it was part of a play, wasn’t included in the English Poetry Database.
10 Was Finnegans Wake an attempt to write an unconcordanceable book? If so, the attempt failed: see Clive Hart, A Concordance to Finnegans Wake (1963). Hart, of the University of Lund, persuaded his wife to type Finnegan out on three-by-two-and-a-half cards and together they sorted it into a “Primary Index,” an index of “Syllabifications,” and an index of “Overtones.” (The word Propellopalombarouter, for example (p. 314), is separately indexed under Propellopalombarouter, and its syllabifications pellopalom-barouter, lopalombarouter, palombarouter, lombarouter, barouter, router, and outer.) With Hart’s help, I found one lumber closet and a slurred version of Lombard Street: “… she rapidly took to necking, partying and selling her spare favours in the haymow or in lumber closets or in the greenawn ad huck (there are certain intimacies in all ladies’ lavastories we just lease to imagination) or in the sweet churchyard close itself …” (p. 68). “I wouldn’t miss her for irthing on nerthe. Not for the lucre of lomba strait” (p. 207).