Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Dictionaries Are Filled With Words About How Much of a Dork You Are

I don't collect a lot of things. Let me rephrase that so I'm not a lying bastard. I don't build up large collections because once things become more than a couple shelf loads I start getting rid of things. I just don't like the clutter. Anyway, shortly after I graduated high school I was working with my Aunt and she gave me a dictionary from when she was in high school. So like I have it and since she passed it's, of course, never going to go away. But at the time it was just this cinder block that I kind of lugged about as I moved time, and time, and time again. 

In my third year of college I was writing a paper about ethics, which is one of my favorite subjects even though I don't think I've ever talked about it on here, when the power went out. I am a terrible speller, my mother is a terrible speller, so when the power went out and my word processor was gone I went scrambling for a dictionary. The only one I had was the one my Aunt had given me. Now I start flipping through the thing making sure that I've spelled everything correctly and that the words mean what I think they mean. That's when I first noticed the change that occurs in word definitions over time. It should have been obvious since I tended to read a lot of beat generation authors at the time but it just escaped me until that moment. And that was when I started picking up dictionaries to check out the differences. So like I have four dictionaries in my house right now and my wife just asked me when I was going to get rid of some of them and I told her that she could have them when she pried them out my god-damned hands. 

Perhaps I have a problem. 

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