A recent Locus Roundtable question led me to thinking about this. It starts with a confession: I read dictionaries, a habit since early, early years of Richard Scarry.
Not cover to cover, as you would a novel. Rather I pick them up, flip through the pages, pause to dip into them in search of new words to file away mentally. I relish new words so I’m always looking for them, especially sinewy and interesting new verbs, or nouns crusted with bits of morphological history.
I know I’m not alone in this — it’s a disease that many (though certainly not all, or even most, I think) writers (and some non-writers) share, and it’s not one its sufferers talk about much, because Good LORD how boring is that, reading the dictionary?
I have an American Heritage I’ll never part with, and beyond that the beloved Compact OED, three volumes and accompanying magnifying glass, that my brother Lowell got for me while I was in grad school and which will be with me till my dying days, I firmly well. And specialized dictionaries: a Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, a dictionary of foreign terms, another of fashion terms, and a glut of foreign language dictionaries, Russian, Hawaiian, Navaho, jostle for space on one on my most visited bookshelves.
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
(science fiction, story)
Decades later the music was what really tipped Glen off. He heard a song on the radio, a brand new release, and remembered the day he’d first heard it, twenty years earlier. Everything began to fall together then. Or maybe that was when it really started to shatter.
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