A few weeks ago, the BBC Magazine ran a feature on a gentleman named Ammon Shea who reads dictionaries for fun. His latest conquest was the 20-volume, 21,000 page Oxford English Dictionary, and Shea absorbed the 59 million words in just about a year.
Here in America, we think it’s a victory if our kids can spell dictionary.
Maybe you recall a National Geographic poll from 2006 that found 6 of 10 young Americans couldn’t find Iraq on a map.
The other four had never heard the word ‘map.’
Yes, the education system (and the corporatization thereof) is to blame, as are parents and students and a collective national attention span akin to a ferret on Dexatrim.
Add the popularity of email, text messaging, the Internet, reality shows, YouTube and MySpace and we are living in the age of widespread solipsism – even if most of those involved have no idea what the word means.
And let’s face it: having a president who is more notable for his gaffes and futility than anything closely resembling intellectualism doesn’t exactly inspire the populace to ratchet-up the brain power.
Quite interesting, then, that the readers of the BBC Magazine responded to a request by the editors to send in a few of their favorite words. The response was overwhelming enough to publish a list of the 50 favorites.
Spanghew, defined as “to cause a toad or frog to fly into the air off the end of a stick” tops my list, with tintinnabulation (the sound a bell makes when rung) and mallemaroking (the carousing of seaman on Greenland whaling ships) finishing a close second.
As the crux of the discussion centers on the King’s English, many of the 50 finalists may be foreign to American eyes - as are most of the ones with more than three syllables.
Comments
My children,all married now, laugh when
I ask them what a word means. They say to their own children,when they ask about a word then look at me and say, I know Mom, "get the Dictionary"
Even at my age 67, if I see a new word, or hear someone say a word that
is not familiar to me, I get out the Dictionary.
A good habit I think, It keeps us on our toes with the world, and keeps us
constantly educationing ourselves, and teaching our children to do the same.
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