Have you ever opened a dictionary to look up a word, only to find yourself distracted by another word on the page? The definition of that word steers you to yet another, some two hundred pages ahead, and before you know it your fingers are cavorting as if in a random dance on the leaves of the lexicon.
This week's words in AWAD were chosen by following precisely that route. You could call it Brownian Motion, Browsing the Web, or Looking Words Up In a Dictionary.
I think many of us here fit this category. And, probably, many of us have our own names for this process. I call it "reading the dictionary". What do you call it?
reading the dictionary sounds good to me!
I've tended to cal it chasing the sun after the title of a book on lexicography that I once read (see this
article for an explanation of why the book was so named). But it seems to me that
chercher les mots might be a goodly moniker, too. A take on another book title yields
After Lemmata.
yes, reading (or browsing) the dictionary; although moreso recently, I've been Looking Something Up (with Something being deliberately veiled).
Perusing the dictionary...
(with Something being deliberately veiled). Ooh, ooo! Hogwash a-comin', I'll betcha! I hope!
I think the deliberate veiling of Something is just so that you can avoid being caught out by someone who notices that although you said you were looking up zymurgy you're reading stuff in the Js.
Word surfing
or
The Definition Two-Step
This was kind of a game I played with my kids when they were in elementary school and had to look up vocabulary words for homework. There was a hit song that went...one step forward two steps back. Well we were doing this with looking up words and flipping through the pages of the dictionary. We called it the definition two step instead of the Texas two step. granted this is going back maybe 18 years
Then there's the Aztec two-step, AKA Montezuma's revenge.
in another part of the world aka delhi belly, which you could get from patting a dilli billi.
With today's word (as with many here) my mind flew to the first time I learned it, while reading Poe's The Raven:
"Eagerly I wished the morrow; vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow, sorrow for the lost Lenore". Appropriate timing, as we've just passed Poe's 201st birthday on January 19. Thank you for your wonderful world of words, and all they convey.
Of all the lost persons in books Lenore certainly is the most larmoyant poetically lost one of all.
Surcease... I like the way Shakespeare used it in the Scotish Play.
Macbeth:
If it were done, when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly. If th' assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease, success: that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all—here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'd jump the life to come.
Macbeth Act 1, scene 7, 1–7
