I’m doing an Instagram series of colouring pages from Renee Chin’s The ABC Coloring Book. I worked on these for over two years, so it was especially satisfying to get to the end of the alphabet. Each post is around a theme or concept – a meditation on details.
- “A” is for “ambivalence” and “alacrity”
- “B” is for Borodin (Alexander Borodin, a 19th Century Russian composer)
- “C” is for “cartography”
- “D” is for “dessert” and “desert” and “deserve”
A lexicon is a collection of terms. In a language, the lexicon can be found in a dictionary. In a discipline or practice, like sociology or juggling, there is a lexicon of the terms used specially for that purpose, in that context. Sometimes there’ll be a textbook for that, but often it’s a bit less structured. A lexicon tends to be ordered alphabetically when the words are written using the alphabet. (So a lexical order is usually just alphabetical!)
This project is a collection. Visiting every letter as though it were a country, after a long meditation on its shape and form, and buying a postcard from the gift shop until there’s one from each. You could do this over and over again. As a family, as a class, as a person, find a list – any list – and meditate on it. Create a collection celebrating the details or taking souvenirs. Here are some ideas for projects like this:
National Animals
Look up the national animals of every country in the world or on your continent. If you live in a country with provinces or states or prefectures, those might each have their own. Learning political geography can be tedious and the names and locations of countries and regions are largely arbitrary. When we weave in the story of these chosen animals and try to understand why they were chosen, the names and locations of countries and regions become more meaningful. All that detail gives our concepts texture – they don’t slip away as easily. Write a story for each one – give them personalities and histories and hobbies! Canada’s national animal is the beaver…
Neighbourhood Street Names
Vancouver has numbered avenues stretching from East to West, but streets going North to South have names. On the West Side, many of the streets are named after plants. As all philosophy students learn, the poison Socrates was condemned to drink for corrupting the youth was Hemlock. Hemlock Street is home to at least one pharmacy and several other medical and health-related establishment. You could explore the many different species of laurel when you reach Laurel Street. Perhaps some are invasive while others are healing or delicious. Spruce Street might inspire the purchase of some hardy outdoor plants for a diminutive Vancouver balcony while Cypress Street may inspire a day of snowshoeing on Cypress Mountain as winter sets in. If you’re a teacher, the built environment is full of mysterious labels and names to explore, ways to latch on to the local geography, local history, and really wriggle into the infrastructure with a healthy curiosity and a dose of skepticism. As a parent, walks through your neighbourhood, a long drive, or even a bus ride can be an exploration, an undertaking shared between all family members. But really, just do it yourself! You can balance the scales a little by bringing enough curiosity and creativity to a project like this to make up for how little was often employed to name streets and stations and neighbourhoods in the first place. Bring unabashed enthusiasm to local infrastructure and inoculate yourself against a tedious commute.
Musical Keys
A, B, C, D, E, F, G, natural, sharp, and flat, minor and major….And go! You don’t need to play a musical instrument to play this game. It might even build your confidence if conversations about music sometimes leave you confused or excluded. You can even pick a genre or try and stick to composers or performers whose names start with the same letter. Composers whose names start with B would be an easy place to start: Beethoven, Bach, Borodin. Did Beethoven compose anything in B, B flat, or B sharp? Well, when you start investigating, you will notice that B flat and B are very popular (Beethoven composed his String Quartet No. 13 in B flat major, Bach composed fugues in B major and B minor, Borodin composed his Symphony No. 2 in B minor), B sharp is hardly ever seen. Go find out why! Listen to the pieces, find images of antique manuscripts, learn about the composers’ lives. Or find as many pop songs as you can, each in a different key. If you’re new to music theory, listen for grief or rage or regret in the music. How often are those pieces in a minor key? What about triumph and humour and patriotism? Are those in major keys? Go wide and discover other tonal systems, other harmonies and progressions that leave major and minor keys looking sheepishly at their shoes.
Stake Your Claim
Find a collection or a list or a group of things: animals, streets, musical keys, letters of the alphabet, letters in another script. Treat them as a challenge and a constraint. You don’t have to learn everything about everything. Just learn something about 13 official animals (Canada has ten provinces and three territories) or the 20 closest street names to your home or composers with names starting with the letters A to G. Build a lexicon for your own specialty. You are staking your claim to a patch of expertise.
Have fun and pop over to Instagram to see more letters and let me know what you’ve been working on. Toodles!