Look it up

As my brother will be happy to tell you, I spent much of my childhood sitting lengthwise on the loveseat, reading.  Consequently, my mom's household tasks were often punctuated by hollered conversations such as:

Sarah: What does 'bough' mean?
Mom: Spell it?
Sarah: B-O-U-G-H
Mom: A large tree branch.
Sarah: Ooooh, ok.  Thanks.

I could say so much about how great my parents were at encouraging reading, but that's a rhapsody for another time.  Today, I'm pondering one branch (bough?) of the phenomenon, the result of Mom starting to say, "Look it up."  You see, our household was among the last generation to have bought a full set of World Book Encyclopedias -- gilded paper edges and all -- and from a door-to-door salesman, no less, if memory serves!  This set included a two-volume dictionary, and as I got older I was increasingly referred to the bottom shelf of the bookcase to answer my own questions.

As a PhD student, I'm perpetually driven by the need to "look it up," but at the same time, that long-trusted process is supposed to be only the first step.  My supervisor is always pushing me to go beyond quoting other critics and disagree with them or at least assert something new.  This is what I struggle with just now.  I feel most confident in the "newness" of certain kinds of research, which in fact is just more looking it up.

For example, in one of his college-age notebooks, Tennyson made a little glossary of words from Old and Middle English.  I've transcribed it and am doing some detective work to create a list of his sources.  I'm then checking a concordance to see which little gems from his treasury he dropped into his poems.  Meanwhile, as I read through his Arthurian poems, the Idylls of the King, I collected samples of archaic words he used to give them a medieval flavor.  This is stuff I'm fairly confident has not been done.  But in the end, it's just information gathering.  What I then say about how that should influence our understanding of Tennyson's poetry is... shall we say... under development?  Or just underdeveloped.  Still, nothing solves blockage like a deadline, so I hope I will have something resembling a rough draft by the time I go home for Christmas.  Then commences ALL THE EDITING.