The vocabulary in Moby Dick leans heavily towards whaling terms. There are ships and sails. Oars and harpoons. Tides and waves. Blubber and oil. Most of all there are whales; over a thousand mentions of them.
This is not surprising. It’s hardly worth mentioning. There is a reason the original title of the book was just The Whale before Melville decided to spice things up and name it after Ahab’s albino archenemy.
More interesting is to look at the book’s era specific words: Terms that it used much more frequently than a modern author would but roughly with the same frequency as his 1850 peers. Some of my favorites include: ‘afflictions’ instead of ‘problems’, ‘commenced’ instead of ‘began’ and ‘labors’ instead of ‘effort’. Languages change slowly but they do change!
Melville’s fondness for mythological metaphors also shows through clearly with words such as:
- astrological
- demigod
- sagittarius
- titans
Perhaps less important but more amusing was my discovery that Melville apparently has an unusual fondness for “un” words with almost 300 making it past the “used at least five times more often than normal” mark. Some of them are fairly ordinary descriptive words such as “unceremoniously” and “unimpressed” but quite a few are rather strange.
Why use “dark” when you can use “unilluminated”?
Why settle for “cruel” when you can have “unpitying”?
Things aren’t “missing” or “lacking”, they are “unsupplied”, and whale’s aren’t “energetic” but “unexhausted”.
Describing things by what they aren’t certainly gives a sentence a unique bit of flavor.
