AMERICAN HERITAGE

Sometimes at work I get lost in my dictionary. I'll be looking up shish kebab to see whether it's one word or two, then I'll notice that shitfaced is in the dictionary. It's just three words down from shish kebab, which can also be spelled shish kabob. First there's shit, then shit-eating grin, then shitfaced, then, in case you're curious, shitkicker, shit list, shitload.

After that there's shittah, which I thought was maybe slang like niggah, but it's actually a tree mentioned in the Bible, now called an Asiatic acacia.

That's all the shit words in my dictionary, unless you count shittim, the wood of the shittah, which was used to make the Ark of the Covenant.

No shit.

Last night I needed to look up the phrase Homeric laughter, which means loud, unrestrained laughter (Does everyone know that? I'd never heard that), and I came across homoecious, relating to parasites that spend their whole lives on one host, like Bert and Ernie, and homological. I can’t wait to use homological. Like some straight person will be blathering on about something that straight people blather on about, and I’ll interrupt and say, “Well, that’s all well and good, but it’s hardly homological.”

Anyway, I look up a word, and before you know it I’ve squandered like 20 minutes nosing around in the dictionary. This is a vice I’d like to see my students pick up, especially since, despite my best efforts, I can't sell them on smoking.

After "don't ask me," the three words most commonly heard in my classroom are "look it up." For some reason, my students think I'm a dictionary — and a whorish one at that; they think they can just say the word and I'll open up.

Well, I am easy, but I have my pride. If you want me to treat you nice, you have to show me that you care. You can't just use me for your purposes, then immediately forget what salacious means — not even care that it comes from the Latin salire, meaning to jump.

Like they'll be editing a story about "sundry race cars lining the track," and they'll pepper me with questions: What does sundry mean? Is that supposed to be Sunday? Should we just say many? Is race car one word or two?

That pocket dictionary they're required to have might as well be a big pile of dog shittah, because they don’t go anywhere near it.

After I say "look it up" a thousand times, some of them catch on that the POINT of the class is for them to become editors. And editors don't sit around a newsroom asking other editors how to spell. Editors do it alone. (Note to self: Trademark phrase/have printed on T-shirts for next semester).

Some of my students do discover the magic of their dictionary. They eventually get the notion that it's the tangible sum of our whole beautiful language. They understand its authority. They undergo their own little Protestant Reformation and discover that they don't need a priest to make sense of the Bible; they can do it themselves, with their dictionary.

When I was in fourth or fifth grade, my grandpa bought me a giant red American Heritage dictionary with little illustrations and speckled end paper. I think my mom was tired of me asking her what this meant and what that meant all the time, and our minuscule paperback dictionary wasn't up to the job. She must have mentioned to her dad, who owned some office supply stores in Wisconsin (stay tuned for a separate post), that a dictionary would be a good Christmas present for me. And it was. It was the best ever. I remember spending hours lying on the shag carpet, paging through that huge book, reading definitions and looking at illustrations and smelling the delicious scent of all that crisp, tissue-thin new paper. And oh, the dictionary was MINE; if someone in the house needed to know what something meant, they had to come to me.

Years later, in college, I read Malcolm X's autobiography, a great book that Spike Lee made a horrible mockery of in his highly touted but idiotic film "X." Will someone please make a movie about the great Malcolm X that is not a load of shittah? Anyway, I was floored when I came to the part in his autobiography where he talks about being in prison, how he was just a run-of-the-mill, uneducated black man sitting behind bars — nothing in his past but crime and time wasted on materialistic pursuits: fancy cars, loud suits, gambling, loose women, shiny things. And nothing in his future but more of the same. He decides he has to educate himself. And he does as a grown man what I did as a little kid: He starts reading the dictionary. Only he really reads it, from A to Z. Every word. Years later the word aardvark would hold a special meaning for him because it was the first word in the prison's dictionary. It was the beginning of his education, his real life.

Samuel Johnson published “A Dictionary of the English Language” in the mid-18th century. Single-handedly. No wonder James Boswell spent a lifetime celebrating him. I mean, yeah, there was the infamous appetite, the whores, the wars, the adventures. Plenty to celebrate in his best pal’s life. But the dictionary stands apart. How can one dude write a dictionary?

And Johnson's dictionary was considered authoritative until the Oxford English Dictionary came along like 100 years later.

Rick had a copy of the O.E.D. Not the 20-volume set, but an abridged version. It was awesome. I want one for Christmas.

I have bonded with a lot of people over words. And with some of these people I have had words, if you know what I mean. Like my ex-girlfriend, a big Scrabble-freak who knows all the two-letter words in the dictionary, despite her charming inability to spell definitely and sundry other everyday words.

And of course all my copy editor friends: Is cock ring one word or two?

And my ex-husband, who referred affectionately to our dictionary as The Dic, which led me, wit that I am, to make allusions to The Pocket Dic (stay tuned for a separate, salacious post).

And my best friend Ben. Not long after we met we had a discussion in which the word prude came up, and I sent him the definition from my dictionary, which was "a person who is overly modest in dress or behavior, to the point of annoying others." I noted that "to the point of annoying others" should be appended to every definition in the dictionary. And he sent back some choice examples, such as murder: to kill unlawfully and with malice, to the point of annoying others.

If I have a kid, I'm going to put one of those huge, fat dictionaries on a stand in the middle of her room. And when she cries, "What do you mean I'm an 'irksome parasite sent by Jehovah to bedevil' you?" I'll scream, "LOOK IT UP!"

And if she's a kid worth having, she'll come out of her room and say: "Mom, did you know parasite is from the Greek parasitos, meaning one who eats at the table of another? I thought you might also be interested in paraselene, an illusion caused by moonlight passing through ice. And then — listen to this! — there's parapraxis, an action in which one's intention is not fully carried out, as in the mislaying of objects — like all those times you forgot to pick me up from school."

"Very good, darling,” I’ll say proudly. “Now go look up forgot."