meet my dictionary

when emma and i were ten, my mother took us to walmart for school supplies. i remember standing awfully before the dictionary and thesaurus displays, which stood in a spot of prominence in the middle of a main aisle, as the month of september is prone to place them. they didn't exactly tower over me, because i wasn't very short even back then, but it was still a significantly dazzling sight to behold: a repetitious array of primary colors, tiles of "dictionary! dictionary! dictionary!" yelping at my eyes over and over in evenly spaced margins. i didn't know what a thesaurus was, so i wrote it off as some archaeological primer concerning mesozoic reptiles (ah! what a shame). but that fat little red book, with its sharp corners and glossy cover, boasting 75,000 entries and promising "revisions" and "updates"--well, i decided that i needed to have one. my mother bought two copies, and my sister and i went home with shiny new dictionaries on our laps.

a week later i dropped mine into a tray of bright red paint, which, i believe, was being applied to our front door. i was devastated for about a month, and then i realized how awesome it looked and embraced the accident.


eight years later, my little lexiconical friend still serves me well (even if it does not actually include the word "lexiconical"). it always seems to be readily at my fingertips whenever i am at a loss for definition. i have a bad habit of misplacing particular books just when i'd most like them to be in my hands, but i've never lost my dictionary once in all these years. when i need to look up words like "coruscating" or "lissome" it is always right there, like lassie, like that thank-you note i keep forgetting to write, like the light switch in the howards' kitchen. i am pretty darn attached to my dictionary, and i think i'll always have him, forever and ever.

(i realize that this is kind of lame, so you're allowed to laugh if you wanna.)

(also, pages 315-316 are missing, so if you need to look up the word "gravy," i would advise you to look elsewhere.)

oh! and while we're on the topic of dictionaries, check out the photographic dictionary, a conglomeration of two of my favorite things: photographs and words. some of my favorite entries are hang, distance, no, bulge, and void.