I just removed all the postits from my dictionary because I was worried that they would corrupt the printing on the pages but I did it with regret because it was such an interesting record of the lookups.
What we need is an online dictionary with a related database of personal lookups. how could we move this idea forward?
And I suppose a related issue is the persistance of the OED to keep their database prohibitively expensive.
for example:
1/15/04 cenotaph .. E.Dickinson poem #1192 .. "an honest tear
is durabler than bronze" --- monument honoring one whose
body is interred elsewhere.
1/26/04 burnoose ... Wallace Stegner "Crossing to Safety"
3/15/04 cronyism ... discussed by Jason and Angela ...
Kronos ... Martha Steward, Cheney and Ley
9/03/04 espadrille ... "tender is the night" as in espalier
1/15/04 ineluctable ... New Yorker article on Howard Dean
9/03/04 lassitude ... also stopped on 'last' and saw Dylan
Thomas reference, "She's down to the last of the elder flower
wine"
9/03/04 Limpid ... Tender is the Night ... "It was a limpid, black
night, hung as in a dull basket from a single, star"
I never thought of post-it-ing my dictionary.
I have pencilled notes all through my Bible and bird book, maybe I'll try that with the dictionary.
Thanks
Some company or other has come out with...either a pen or maybe a highlighter that has little bitty sticky notes built right into it, I do believe.
Welcome, Dwight.
For the benefit of the old padre (who can be a bit slow), please explain the joy of having a "record of the lookups" in one's dictionary? I almost never look up a word in just one dictionary, so that further complicates my (lack of) understanding of the whole post-it thing. Please explain using short words in simple sentences.
Dear Father Steve,
As you are a multiple dictionary lookup man, your mode of operation would introduce an additonal challenge but my idea is fairly simple.
When I was given the 2 volume Shorter OED for my 60th birthday, I became intrigued with the idea of keeping track of the words I looked up, why I looked them up and how my understanding was enriched by the look up.
Like us all, I forget so much. So the first thrust was to have a marker within the dictionary so that I might go back to the word I had looked up and probably not retained. Then I found a second benefit, that my lookups actually were a documentation of some history: conversations with my son, discussions with my loved one, books I had read.
So given a vehicle I thought that the record of dictionary lookups might have some of the aspects of a journal but with the particular connection to the life around words and ideas and reading.
One other point of view is that such a record personalizes the dictionary itself. Dictionaries carry references, particularly the OED, -- how a word was used generally by the noteworthy authors. That book "The madman and the professor" on the OED, documents how references were gathered from readers all over England and then the startling things was that many of them came from this inmate for the criminally insane.
Each of us has his own particular claim to sanity and insanity and the way we use words and why is just one part of that.
Finally, dictionaries are basically databases. Technical novice that I am I wonder -- couldn't each person maintain a relational database which over time would show all the words that one had looked up and why , etc. Some relation would need to be built to an online dictionary and the recorded lookups. I have not in anyway thought out the technical implementation but I have the faith that a database technician could.
In the internet era, the possibility of gathering usages in the way it was originally done for the OED would be greatly enhanced.
Hope this clarifies. Thank you for your interest.
Dwight Eastman
Nowdays, (inspite of my collection of over 30 dictionariesalas, the compact OED is not one) i find i look thing up on line.
have you used OneLook? its positively addicting..
meanwhile i have come to accept the fact that certain words will have to come, and come again, and come again into my consciousness before i remember them. (but eventually they do sink in..
(search here at AWAD for spree.. (yes, twice i started posts, each time claiming this was a new idea.--and that's just the example i can remember!)
Now that I understand Dwight's idea, it makes a lot of sense.
I have never kept track of words that I look up, but I do have two other collections that are of a parallel sort. One is my quotations collection, in which I record things written by others that I think I might one day wish to use in some yet-to-be disclosed way. The other, the one for which I take a lot of teasing from my sweet bride, is my database (it used to be a notebook) in which I record all of the bibliographical data for each book which I have read since 1967.
Dwight's idea is no more lunatic than either of mine and sounds like it would produce some interesting data over time.
in which I record things written by others What's that kind of book called, again?
quotations collection, in which I record things written by others that I think I might one day wish to use in some yet-to-be disclosed way
I thought EVERYONE did that! My mom used to put a small dot in front of a word looked up in a dictionary. Amazing...over the years. some words had MANY dots. Many of us can relate, I think. >^--^<
record things written by others
a commonplace book
Ah, yes--thanks. Uh, what was it I asked, again?
