Dee Dee's Toes

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Dee Dee's toes.
I painted them myself.

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My OED
The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is something every lover of language my age wanted at their desk. Four pages are shrunk to fit on one and it comes with a magnifying glass. (A TV remote is shown for scale.) I got this for $29 when signing up for a book club many years ago. I don't believe such things exist anymore, at least not in the same form they once did.

Of course, as new words enter the lexicon, a printed dictionary becomes increasingly dated, but a good etymology is timeless, and there is more language history in these two volumes than I could ever enjoy in ten lifetimes.

For years the OED editors would announce new words being accepted into the dictionary and news outlets would end their broadcasts with them, sometimes with an aw shucks headshake, sometimes with a quizzical smile, as in “my how things have changed.” I haven't seen a story like that for some time.

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Correction
My son Charlie found the book on Erie I had referred to here (The Closest I'll Ever Get to Immortality in this Lifetime); it's called Erie: Chronicle of a Great Lakes City, and is by Edward Wellejus. I mistakenly said Larry Pintea had collaborated on this book, but I was wrong. Shows what time will do to memory.

This is a very special book, BTW. It's inscribed to me from Mom and Dad, Christmas 1983.

Started: 2012-07-20