Aging and Wisdom

This is not to cast aspersions on those rat bastards who didn't send me a damn thing. I still love you, despite your grievous flaws.

And, thanks to one of my gifts, I have a gift to pass on to all of you...

the gift of

My heaviest gift so far was also my most useful. It is the New Oxford Dictionary of English. This was particularly exciting for me because Words Are My Life. Well, not my whole life. There was a period when Trees Were My Life, but that is over and done with. Now, it's Words, Words, Words -- it's just that an obscene amount of them seem to be things like "if", "foreach", and "$wingnut =~ s/\s//g".

Among the valuable items I was forced to leave behind in my exodus from the land of furry ungulates was my collection of dictionaries. It has been a painful process dealing with what these people call English without them.

Now, the drought has ended. The New Oxford Dictionary of English, at more than half a stone in weight and with 4 million words of text, is the largest single-volume dictionary in the world. It has 350,000 words, phrases, and definitions including more than 2,000 which are entirely new.

Just in terms of sheer mass, it is an important work. Gravitational fields are affected. The very fabric of time is altered in its vicinity. But the true magic is in the four million words it contains. I am about to pass that magic on to you. Here are some words to increase your vocabulary. Sprinkle them throughout your conversation and awe those around you.

Please note that these definitions are taken verbatim from the New Oxford Dictionary of English without their knowledge and therefore this email may constitute a serious breach of copyright. So don't tell anybody at Oxford or I may end up in an oubliette.

oubliette

noun - a secret dungeon with access only through a trapdoor in its ceiling.

 

otaku

plural noun (in Japan) - young people who are skilled in or obsessed with computer technology to the detriment of their social skills. - ORIGIN Japanese, literally 'your house', alluding to the reluctance of such young people to leave the house.

Aga

noun Brit. trademark - a type of heavy heat-retaining cooking stove or range and intended for continuous heating. - ORIGIN 1930s: from the Swedish name Aktiebolaget Gasackumulator. (cdy - Vicki desperately wants one of these although we both have only a shaky notion of what they are exactly. All we know is that they're used for cooking and they're big and expensive and if you are at all fashionable you will covet one.)

booboisie

noun [mass noun] US informal - stupid people as a class - ORIGIN 1920s: from BOOB, humorous formation on the pattern bourgeoisie.

dalek

noun (in science fiction) a member of a race of hostile alien machine-organisms which appeared in the BBC television serial Dr. Who from 1963. - ORIGIN an invented word, coined by author Terry Nation after a volume of an encyclopaedia covering the alphabetical sequence dal-lek. (cdy - just liked the origin of this one. It looks like the kind of info that could win you a trivia game some day.)

floreat

exclamation - used before a name to express one's desire that the specified institution or person will flourish. - ORIGIN Latin, 'let flourish...' originally used in floreat Etona, the motto of Eton College.

methemoglobinemia

noun - US spelling of methaemoglobinaemia

Well, I think that's about enough knowledge for today. You can get your own copy of the New Oxford English Dictionary by going to LINK REMOVED (note: When I first wrote this I used to have a small affiliate site but I removed it eons ago, and so now I'm just cleaning up the broken link).

That's the other bit of exciting news I have for you. I found a Canadian online bookstore somewhat equivalent to amazon.com or amazon.co.uk. Yes, there is a strong element of self-interest in pointing this out. Please bookmark LINK REMOVED and go to the bookstore site from my site and buy many many books. Your brain will grow and, hopefully, so will my wallet. Anyone who shows up on my doorstep with proof they bought a book through this link, I will buy a pint of bitter for at the Navigation and introduce to Oscar the Parrot. It's a fine pub, the Navigation, and Oscar is a charming bird, though he is distressingly large; think of a colourful, talkative chicken with an enormous curved beak.

Must go play with my other gifts now,