Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Top Ten Tuesdays: Santa Give Me Some Love - and Some Definitions

Okay, it’s not Tuesday and this is far from a top ten.  Actually it’s a Top One.  The Broke and the Bookish’s Top Ten Tuesday topic is, “What books do you wish Santa will bring you?”  There are plenty of books I’d like to have, but only item, book or no book, that I would flip out over like a little kid if that jolly fat man left it under my sad little Charlie Brown tree.

1. The Oxford English Dictionary – Some people have a car they dream of owning one day, or skimp through their twenties and thirties to buy a Harley.  Maybe it’s a really expensive pair of shoes or a state of the 515Hom-a zL._SS400_art home entertainment system. For me, it’s a bunch of words, roughly 600,000 of them.  I don’t remember the first time I saw the OED in the library, but I do remember that the volumes were glowing, and choral music played in the background.  Okay, that probably didn’t happen, but I was – and still am – enthralled by the very sight of the twenty-volume collection.  I wanted it from the moment I saw it up until, well, up until I found out just how much it cost.  Right now the complete set is going for a measly $995.  That’s not even one grand, no problem. 

So the OED is my dream purchase.  When I finally “make it big” – whatever that entails exactly – there will be a shelf in my library dedicated the Grand Master of English lexicons.  Until then, I’ll get by with my tattered pocket Webster’s.

4 comments:

  1. I wonder who's in charge of compiling all those 600,000 words and writing all the definitions and tenses and so forth? They must employ an army's worth of people for that!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh snap! I didn't expected that. I refused to do the top 10 this week, but this is an interesting spin on it. It's not necessarily novels that can be under the tree.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I have coveted that book for as long as I can remember. If you get it before I do, you have to promise me visitation rights.

    ReplyDelete
  4. @ E. L. - Am I a hopeless nerd to think that would be a dream job?

    @ Ben - It's probably easier and definitely cheaper to use all the really good dictionary sites on the web, but nothing will ever match leaving those pages.

    @ CvlSrvt - Ha! We'll split 'em. You can A-L; I'll take M-Z. We can switch every six months...

    ReplyDelete