Do You Feel Lucky?

(and feel free to comment! My older posts are certainly no less relevant to the burning concerns of the day.)

Monday, June 29, 2009

Any Dictionary Surfers Out There?

Any time I ever as a kid looked up a word in the dictionary, it always turned into another episode in this infinitely-regressive/recursive exercise in interlinked meaning that I'd somehow fallen into. I'd find the word I was looking up, and I'd read the definition of it, and then I'd say - well heck, then! If that's the definition of this word, what do they say that word means?

It wasn't so much not knowing, as wanting to hear it straight. A lot of times you look a word up, it's a little different from how you'd have thought - and that creates a curiosity about the big book's take on some of the other words. And every time, it would just keep going like a brand-new bad habit! Starting from one word and then re-routing my search for meaning through one of the words in its definition, and on and on from there until the urge spent itself, or took a wrong turn up a definitional dead end.

I think one point was to hit as many interrelated words as I could, so I could freeze in my mind the fine shades of meaning between them all while it was still all icy and precise. Fresh from the meaning freezer (definitions melt quickly at brain temperature)!

Another point was the simple amusement inherent in the notion that you could start from "anhydrous" and work your way, link by link, all the way over to "purposive." Just explore the weird places you can be taken on such crooked, ricochet tangents.

But I was also curious to see if I could find a loop where the dictionary goofed it - basically, to catch them defining two synonyms almost solely in terms of each other. Which wouldn't be too suave.

I don't think I ever caught the American Heritage at that, but I'm pretty sure I got Webster's good a couple times! Unfortunately I wasn't really keeping score.

2 comments:

marsanderson said...

I love dictionary surfing. It's usually sparked by Scrabble games for me, after challenging a word Boyfriend played.

dogimo said...

Hm! How frustrating that muse be if you have the bug but you have to wait until after the game is over to do any surfing!

Although, I'm not sure if that's part of the official rules. When we play, the challenged word and ONLY the challenged word is looked up - to prevent people from succumbing to the temptation to briskly browse through the "K" section at need...