Now, I’ve always been a fan of dictionary.com, though my use of it used to be quite infrequent. Of late, I find myself checking it every day - and ‘favouring’ quite a few of the words of the day.
It isn’t always that I do not know the words, but there are times when a one pops up that you either haven’t used or at least haven't heard in a very long time - and I like to put down on my ‘list’ of words.
In the back of my mind, I have this idea that one day they will all come in handy in some bit of writing I’m doing - but in reality, it’s more like I”m compiling my own dictionary that reflects my interests - and they are varied - and therefore, so is the list.
But it’s not just the ‘word of the day’ I like; there are three other categories that are also worth a quick scan and sometimes, even a deeper bit of delving.
It’s funny - because I remember in Grade 4 we used to do ‘dictionary work’. I can’t remember exactly how it worked but I do know that we would be given a list of words and then had to look them up and copy out their definitions. Whether there was ever a test on them, I do not recall. What I do recall is that I absolutely abhorred it! It was the kind of thing that, had I a weaker constitution, would have made me sick to my stomach - that’s how much I disliked it.
Of course, it could have been the circumstances. We had just moved from a fairly big city (at least to me), uprooted ourselves from all we knew, and gone to live in a speck of dust in the mountains where we were aliens in almost every sense of the word - and I had red hair. Cursed!
Because we’d moved ‘mid-term’, I was thrust into a group of people whose allegiances and their foes had already been firmly established - like I said, an alien.
On top of that - it was a catholic school and Vatican II had not yet taken full affect, so the mass, which we had to attend every morning, was still in Latin - interesting, and much more mysterious and ritualistic than what I assume (haven’t been for ages) passes for a mass today.
But again, veering off topic.
Back to dictionaries…
Though I found the surroundings depressing and the dictionary work, tedious - I can’t help but feel that somehow my interest in looking things up had the seeds of its origin in that gloomy world.
Granted, I think I was always a ‘curious’ child (in more ways than one) and given the fact that I had at my disposal at home, a set of encyclopedias and that greatest of compilations, The Book of Wonder, I was already on the road to looking for meaning in the world that surrounded me - but perhaps the 'dictionary diving' solidified the necessity for process; that the act of diligently seeking out new knowledge was in itself a satisfying thing.
I’ll never know - because at the time - I hated it!
And now I’m living with an ‘app’ for a dictionary. Not only does it define words for me but each day, it presents me with 4 ‘little’ items: 1, is the Word of the Day; 2, is the Hot Word of the day; 3 is the Question of the Day; and 4, is the Spanish Word of the Day (clearly, it’s an American app and not Canadian - otherwise, it would be French!).
I’ve now got in the habit of checking it every day and find that, at times, it’s little jolt of definitions, semantics, grammar, usage, style, origin, etc, though certainly not in depth, supplies my brain with a little bit of previously unknown fodder to digest and kickstarts the thinking process for the day.
I find it quite tasty.
And fun.
Amen.
