Coming up on this weekend's show:
-No fucking clue. Sorry!
I'm a big fan of this koo-koo online world we live in. I podcast, I twitter, I blog (sometimes), I consult Google, Wikipedia and YouPorn several times every single day and feel like I'd be lost without them. So I'm not one of these old timey, internet-hatin' crochety (is chrochety the right word? Where could I find a good synonym for it?) geezers who think everything was better back in once upon a time land.
That said, it did occur to me that one of the great pleasures of my youth - I say 'great pleasures' but I mean 'great time wasters' - was browsing the dictionary. Not reading it cover to cover or looking up one word for one reason but kind of lazily flipping pages looking for words that looked cool or maybe risqué or even words I thought I knew the meaning of but knew I'd be hard pressed to define precisely. (define exactly?) I don't know that it was the most defning activity as far as my education or even vocabulary went but I feel it broadened my palette (wait is it palette that has paints or palate? I better look that up)
I don't even own a dictionary anymore. Not a real one. I own a couple specialized ones for novelty's sake but not the kind of imposing, exciting twenty pounder of a reference book that I grew up in awe of. When I was 18 and living on my own, one of the first things I spent real money on was a cheap websters for myself. You had to have a dictionary even as late as the 90's but now you really don't need one. You have a world of reference at your fingertips if you have a computer and a phone line or even a portable phone with internet access.
Sure you can still browse through the random pages of wikipedia just to find out random information like we used to randomly browse through the old Brittanica our grandparents had, and when you need a particular word defined you can get it online faster than your parents can look it up in some old book. But you can't really just browse through an online dictionary to get a sense of how vast your own ignorance is. You can't get the feel of turning ancient impossibly thin paper or feel for the grooves cut into the paper to help you turn to a particular letter. Which is one of those little delights that will be completely lost to future generations.
That said, I'm not suggesting for a second that bound dictionaries are better than online ones or that future generations with access to almost limitless information at their fingertips are going to be any less intelligent or informed than we. If anything they're going to make us look like the provincial rubes we made our parents look like as they did to theirs. But they're liable to miss out on the thrill of cracking those ancient tomes. Plus, it's really hard to use the internet as a step stool.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
heh - a blog entry about dictionaries on my birthday... how poetic, to me at least.
i LOVE a fat bound dictionary. i do find hard bounds a bit easier to use if you are only halfway right about how you think a word should be spelled, cos you can keep on looking down the page (hopefully), and finally get to the right entry. and get to discover a few new words along the way. i personally don't get the same feel from reference.com
and i too will randomly flip a dictionary to see whats in there. USUFRUCT is a word that i found that way. had never even heard of it before last year, and since then, have managaed to sneak it into conversation twice... Not familiar with the term? (you know what i'm going to say here, so i won't insult you)
it's true that there is tons more available now, and boy-o-boy, how i manage to fill my head with wikifacts and google searches; but i'm not giving up on old Daniel yet.
Post a Comment