I Love My Dictionary

I love my dictionary. I had it as a birthday present when I turned 17, which tells you just what sort of teenager I was.

It’s a combined dictionary and thesaurus, and I still use it most days. But I wonder today if it’s time to update.

It doesn’t contain the word internet, skipping straight from internee (noun: a person who is interned, esp. an enemy citizen in wartime or a terrorism suspect) to internist (noun: a physician who specialises in internal medicine).

And either side of the space where Google would now roundly sit, it skips delightfully from goofy (foolish; silly) to googly (cricket. An off break bowled with a leg break action).

The words self-important, self-improvement, self-interest and selfish dwell in the column that would now include selfie in a modern edition. 

The word mobile is explained as having freedom of movement, moving between classes, occupations and locations, having transport or a sculpture hung in midair with delicately balanced  parts set in motion by air currents. The term sits neatly after mobcap (noun: a woman’s large cotton cap with a pouched crown, worn especially in the 18^th century).

This dictionary has brought me almost thirty years of pleasure. It’s a book to get lost in, a typographical system of alleyways and tunnels, all leading to the unexpected.

I began my random explorations of the dictionary as a teen, searching out rude words and overjoyed by irony at the sight of things I would never dare say in front of my parents brazenly stamped onto the pages of the very book they’d given me as a gift.

But the desire grew into an addiction, and the search for juicier words took root. Early fumblings with its pages led me to discovering fuddle, cochlea, shibboleth, wampum, arthropod and butter muslin.

Random openings reveal unexpected treats in the form of fleshpots, mawkish, tincture, kohlrabi, and cirrocumulus.    

There’s no doubt, the world has changed massively in the thirty years since I was given this dictionary. I always knew it would bring me pleasure and enlightenment, but what I hadn’t appreciated at seventeen was that, one day, it would make me feel like a time traveller.