No blog yesterday. I'm trying not to fall out of the habit, but also not holding myself to it if it's genuinely an impediment/means the expenditure of additional energy/time I don't have. My ideal is to draft these notes first thing in the morning, at the end of my usual spin-up routine, which would be ideal -- my brain is up and running and I've usually got some random things that I'm thinking about, but I'm not too mired in the specifics of the day just yet.
Anyway, dictionaries.
I came across this post, of which point 3 links to https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary. The thrust of that post is that modern dictionaries tend towards more pre/con-cise and clinical language, which is useful in some ways but is a loss in others. There's mileage for sparking thought/finding the right words, particularly in a context where you're aiming for a richness in your language, in something more ornate.
The post specifically recommends Webster's 1913 dictionary, which you can find online here.
I'm adopting this immediately; I thought I'd also share some of the other tools I use:
- I keep a copy of Roget's Thesaurus (a 1987 printing of the 1852 edition) on my shelf for similar reasons -- it has an arcanity/datedness to its language and word choices that I find useful for fiction or for naming things slightly obliquely.
- Fowler's Modern English Usage. I have a hardcopy of the most recent edition (I think). Really useful for answering specific questions/seeing a breakdown of specific oddities of usage.
- Oxford Dictionary of Etymology. Feels fairly self-explanatory.
- The Penguin Guide to Punctuation. I don't 100% agree with absolutely everything in there, but when I'm not working to an external style guide, this is what I most often use for consistency.
- Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Not a language reference in the same way, but very, very useful.
- All of these I have in hardcopy. Technically, searching things up is much faster digitally, but a) I like having them on my shelf and the tactility of them, and b) there's an element of serendipity, also, that you can only really get from flipping through a book and spotting adjacent entries.
- These other things I use digitally. The most common ones I have mapped to quick searches via my browser bar, so I can e.g. type 'def catenary' into my address bar and jump directly to the relevant page).
- I use Google Definitions (just 'define x' in Google) as a quick-and-dirty lookup. I mostly use this to confirm a definition I already know to make sure I'm using something correctly, or sometimes, to check the spelling of a word that I suspect falls outside my writing program's bailiwick. This is mapped to 'def x', so I often hit the following sequence of keys quite fast:
- WIN + 2 (switches to Firefox)
- Ctrl + L (jumps to the address bar -- if my currently open tab is discardable) or Ctrl + T (open a new tab to use)
- def word
- Alt+ tab back to previous program (or occasionally alt + shift --> n to minimise the browser so it's not lurking in the background)
- Power Thesaurus. It's excellent. Mapped to 'syn x'
- Wiktionary for digging more into the background of a word and related elements. Mapped to 'wikt x'.
- Now, Webster's 1913 Dictionary. Mapped to 'webst x'.
- I also have a handy pdf of 'Gary Gygax's Extraordinary Book of Names', which is a surprisingly useful resource for... well, anything that involves naming.