Gee whiz, library school is cool. Tonight I read all about dictionaries and gained new enthusiasm for an old companion. Did you know that no one holds copyright on the names "Webster" and "Roget", and so tomes bearing their names do not necessarily descend from their works? Or that the distinction between an abridged and an unabridged dictionary is made on simple, numerical lines? Abridged dictionaries contain 50,000 - 265,000 words; unabridged,more than 265,000. It's just that easy. I certainly did no know that online dictionaries allow you to hear words pronounced.

The most shocking thing I learned comes from my failing to have learned to read the directions or the preface. Do you have any idea how much good stuff they put at the front of your dictionary? I have used mine (Webster's Ninth New Collegiate, published by folks whose website proudly states "we go to eleven") for nearly 20 years without appreciating that the first definition is the earliest, not necessarily the preferred, meaning. It says so, right there on page 19!

The textbook's author, William Katz, has a lively style: "If Paradise Lost is the epic of the seventeenth century, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the eighteenth, and Joyce's Ulysses of the twentieth, then the OED is the nineteenth century's unparalleled achievement."

If only all my courses had such engaging reading.

Capital City weather: sunny and clear, not more than 70 today.