The Oxford American Dictionary has deemed the word "scrivener" "historical," and though that means the ultimate authority on words hasn't yet relegated the term to the realm of the "archaic," I think their estimation of the word's age and relative use is certainly justified. I've devoted my entire college education to the study of English and Latin words (and their implications, I suppose), and I likely wouldn't be able to hazard anything but a Latin-etymology based guess about the meaning of "scrivener" if it weren't for one of my favorite masters of the written word, Herman Melville. When his
Moby-Dick wasn't selling at a rate deserving of the original great American novel (my own belief), he wrote the short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener" as an attempt to cope. The result was an ominously dark tale about a personally depressed, arguably insane literary/legal clerk (a scrivener) who "prefer[ed] not to" work, leave the office, and eventually eat, leading to his self-inflicted death in prison. When the narrator, Bartleby's boss, reacts to Bartleby's death and ends the short story with the now (in?)famous words, "Ah, Bartleby! Ah, Humanity!" the reader is left with warped, Melvillian impressions of human mortality, intentions, and "professionalism."
I hope sincerely I'll never be a Bartleby (I decided to not go into law last year-- that was certainly a helpful first step), but I feel I've been a scrivener/scribe/reader/writer at least since my first five paragraph essay. Reading and writing have long been the most rewarding of my personal endeavors, but as I'm sure any bookworm, poet, essayist, or storyteller can tell you, words can certainly lead to some lonely endeavors. Fortunately, the internet has made sharing these endeavors almost shamefully easy, and I hope to do so here on this blog. I'm no poet or storyteller, but bookworm and essayist I certainly am, and I love discussing words and collections of words.
I suppose Melville was an appropriate place for me to start. I'm currently reading and writing about his most enigmatic work, Billy Budd, so I'm sure there'll be a post about that soon. Antebellum American is actually my favorite literary genre, and Melville was such a fasinating writer and man that I'm considering him as potential thesis fodder. This casual examination of him can't hurt my investigations and (attempted) road to true literary scrivener-ship.
In the meantime, call me Sara.
