A "Finnegans Wake" Lextionary: Let James Joyce Jazz Up Your Voca(l)bulary

"Finnegans Wake" is most definitely a deliberately difficult book, complex, complicated, obscure. The reasons for this are diverse, but an important cause is Joyce's capacity for creating his brave new work from thousands of bold new words. They are creative collisions of existing words, concocted collaborations of multilingual words, and combinations of both that are the inception of a comprehensive, catholic language all its own, what is generally referred to as Wakese. A "Finnegans Wake" Lextionary introduces readers to over 800 of these offbeat, bizarre, weird, and way out words, words well outside our dictionaries, that exist in a literary "langscape" all their own. And since Joyce meant for his inventions to contain multiple meanings evocative with elusive allusions, the defintions given here are only the jump-off point for lots more fun with "Finnegans Wake."