The DU Lounge

...What's it mean?"

It's a great tool for building one's vocabulary. Sometimes people wouldn't actually know what they were saying, but it was relatively rare. I used to make a point of looking up every word I didn't know when I read it when I was a kid. I also loved to be corrected when I used a word incorrectly, or - as was more common since I was born in Brooklyn - pronounced them awfully.

Now, of course, we have the internet and google, in some ways faster, but a little less fun.

When I was a boy, for one of my birthdays, I asked my parents for the Webster's unabridged, and they got me one. Sometimes I'd just sit for hours and leaf through the pages.

And then of course, when I got older, and learned about libraries - my town didn't have one - I came across The Oxford English Dictionary, all those beautiful volumes. It's sort of sad that it's now electronic, I think, again, faster, but something is lost.

I believe English is the richest language on Earth, the one with the most words. I personally revel in that, so many ways to say things, so many nuances.

It also handles technical subjects quite well.

And then there's literature, our language formed around that great inventor of words, Shakespeare.

My joy in reading Thomas Pynchon, or at some points Joseph Heller, was stumbling across magnificent words I didn't know.

To each his or her or their own, I guess.