1.1.7
In addition, I have imposed on the reader the condition that he not skip any of the “synonymous” words in this book of mine, many though they be (for it may happen that, on a single road, a herd of fifty words, all with the same meaning, or with two meanings that are close, may pass him by). If he cannot commit to this, I cannot permit him to peruse it and will not offer him my congratulations if he does so. I have to admit that I cannot support the idea that all “synonyms” have the same meaning, or they would have called them “equi-nyms.” They are, in fact, synonymous only in the sense that certain of them may take the place of certain others. Proof of this lies in the fact that beauty, length, whiteness, smoothness, and eloquence differ in kind and in collocation, depending on the differences among the objects they describe. The Arabs,
89 therefore, assigned to each type of beauty, length, etc., a specific name, and it is only our distance from their days that makes us think they all mean the same; how much more so, then, in the case of words relating to jewelry, food, drink, dress, household furnishings, and footwear. Indeed, in my opinion — and I am not afraid of anyone saying, “Aren’t you being opinionated?”—if two words derive from the same base form and refer to the same object (as is the case for example with khajūj and khajawjāh, meaning “wind that passes violently”),90 the longer of the two forms must involve an extension of meaning. Grant me this, if you wish, or be stubborn — it makes no difference to me. Bear in mind, too, that I composed the work at a time when the only book in Arabic I had to refer to or depend on was the Qāmūs, for my books had taken against me as a wife does her husband, and I’d decided to have nothing more to do with them — though it must be acknowledged that the author of the work in question, God rest his soul, did not fail to record a single word descriptive of women; it is almost as though he knew by divine inspiration that someone would come along after him and dive into his “ocean”91 in order to collect such pearls into a single work where they could be so arranged as to lodge more firmly in the mind and become more deeply rooted in the memory.