My husband and I often play Scrabble when we get together with my folks up at the cabin in the Catskills, and occasionally here at home with friends. The running joke at the cabin for a while was that the dictionary in the house was lousy -a small, hardcover college dictionary that hardly deserved the name. We could never find half the stuff we attempted to look up in it.
Finally my step-mother broke down and purchased a new one at the Strand bookshop (a few blocks down from where she works in NYC). As soon as I laid eyes on this tome I was in love. It was huge – no college dictionary, but the full-fledged American Heritage Dictionary of the American Language. Illustrations, updated entries to reflect modern cultural slang and internet-age terminology, regional & world language roots… I had deep dictionary-envy. My well-thumbed and trusted collegiate dictionary paled in comparison (despite my long and trusted history with that particular text). In fact I spent more time browsing through the dictionary than paying attention to our Scrabble games.
So for Christmas this year my father and step-mother got me a copy of the same dictionary, and I was thrilled. We used it here at our house for the first time for a Scrabble game this past weekend, and once again I couldn’t put it down. Shamelessly, I am in love.
PS – Since I’m paying homage to this book, I have it handy here; I was just looking up an item and turned to a page with a gorgeous photo of a scarlet tanager in the margin next to its description. How can I not love a reference text that has a photo of one of one of my favorite birds prominently displayed?
