When I worked in a bookstore some years ago, a regally tall, slender, and impeccably turned-out gentleman approached me, asking me to recommend a good dictionary as a gift for a young friend leaving for college.
Given his interest, his mission, and the importance of the occasion he was celebrating, I considered the reference stack carefully.
As I did so I considered the several dictionaries I own. My favorite is an eight-inch-thick, tan-jacketed Webster’s New International, Second Edition.
I bought it at a tag sale many years ago for five dollars. It had been “new” shortly after the Second World War. It had no electronic capacity to answer my questions, so I searched its pages for information by scanning its tanned pages, not by asking Google.
Even more than its copyright date, it’s out of another time, its addendum filled with words of burgeoning technology, military and peaceable, words of scientific and medical discovery, shedding light on humankind at its best and worst at once.
But he needed something more portable and less arcane, so we selected a serviceable, bright-red Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. The gentleman produced a black, broad-tipped fountain pen and asked if he might inscribe the book before I wrapped it for him.
His message was plain-spoken and wise. Life is a long lesson, he wrote, and a good dictionary is useful and important to a life of learning. He wrote of writing and speaking well and of the dictionary’s importance in this regard. He signed his name and noted the date.
I considered my own signed dictionary, also a Webster Collegiate, I won in high school for having the highest quiz average in American History. Its inscription, however, is dry, without wisdom or sentiment, merely acknowledging my small accomplishment.
It was a slight consolation for me the day I ended my disinterested high-school career, a small turn on the stage while many of my classmates gleaned hefty scholarship. Since I had no kindly mentor to steer me, it took me many years to discover for myself the importance of earned knowledge and resulting pure language, to know the pleasure of turning pages, searching entries to find the exact meaning or context I needed to make my expression explicitly clear.
I hope this young man realized his friend’s wisdom, understood the importance of his sound and timeless advice about scratching on down below the surface to discover the possibilities inherent in every word, of nuance and possible contexts, earned first-hand knowledge of not only exact but oft times resultant beauty of a language struggling to exist in a spell-checker world that considers them irrelevant.
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