Bonus Blog: Whitman's "Word-'Words": Lexicographer and Cartouches

". . .This is the lexicographer or chemist . . . . this made a grammar of the old cartouches, . . ."

From Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855), page 28:

“Hurrah for positive science! Long live exact demonstration!

Fetch stonecrop and mix it with cedar and branches of lilac;

This is the lexicographer or chemist. . .this made a grammar of the old

cartouches,

These mariners put the ship through dangerous unknown seas,

This is the geologist, and this work with the scalpel, and this is a mathematician.”

Lexicography is divided into two related disciplines:

• Practical lexicography is the art or craft of compiling, writing and editing dictionaries.

• Theoretical lexicography is the scholarly discipline of analyzing and describing the semantic, syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships within the lexicon (vocabulary) of a language, developing theories of dictionary components and structures linking the data in dictionaries, the needs for information by users in specific types of situation, and how users may best access the data incorporated in printed and electronic dictionaries. This is sometimes referred to as 'metalexicography'.

A person devoted to lexicography is called a lexicographer - said Wiki.

In Egyptian hieroglyphs, a cartouche is an oblong enclosure with a horizontal line at one end, indicating that the text enclosed is a royal name, coming into use during the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty under Pharaoh Sneferu, replacing the earlier serekh. The Ancient Egyptian word for it was shenu, and it was essentially an expanded shen ring. In Demotic, the cartouche was reduced to a pair of parentheses and a vertical line - said Wiki.