My favorite book, if I had to choose, is the Oxford English Dictionary, unabridged. I never owned the multi-volume set, that parade of giants, but knew their location in many a library. I lugged the two-volume edition with microscopic print wherever I settled, relishing its contents yet ruing needing a magnifier.

Any legitimate dictionary is a trove. (Many alas are patch jobs, peddled to the penny-pinching unwary.) So many choices, noises, emphases, nuances inaudible except to the adept! Illiterate in all but English, my lexicon’s a scrapheap of lingo-bits, ancient and modern. While awed by and envious of my polylingual pals, English for me has been paradise enough, its every branch and twig sagging with ripe possibilities. The OED presents, Google tells me, 273,000 different “headwords,” as they’ve been called (since 1727), of which I can recognize maybe twenty percent (Shakespeare used 31, 534 different words in his extant works, though for sure he knew more). Each headword has its origin, history, complications, mystifications, misunderstandings, as every human life is rife with incident if one peers closely, bristling with lessons and surprises for the attentive observer.

I’ve chucked most of my bulky dictionaries, as I have most printed and bound encyclopedias, compendiums, concordances, references, in favor of online access. a) Who has room and b) Who has time? In the old days, which get older by the day, to check on a word I had to hoist my heft from its delightful chair, shuffle to a shelf, and dig into a fat text, sometimes brandishing a looking glass. Having meandered there I’d get distracted, for I’m reliably distractable (as you may have noticed), and my search for a synonym, antonym, homonym, metonym, pseudonym (no, not pseudonym) would have consumed a dangerous portion of my composing time. Online takes me lickety-split where I’ve asked without disturbing my decumbency (or is it procumbency? – choices! choices!). The portal to the online OED is as tacky as a Burger King’s, but, man, is it efficient, leaving me loads more time to nose around for this or that tidbit to tickle or morsel to amuse.

Words, though, are more than available playfellows or loving fingers in a lonely hour. They’re teachers, preachers, scolds, even confessors in a pinch. They ask you – sotto voce – what you think – that is, really think – why this word and not that? – what’s the tone, tune, timbre, personality of your utterance. How we speak is who we are, evoking if it does not proclaim our relation to listeners and attitude toward being. The more capably we speak, the more words disclose our inner nature, hidden, perhaps, even from ourselves. Is my affect arrogant, phony, sloppy, flaunting, vaunting, inconsiderate? Please don’t nod!

The history of a word therapeutically humiliates, reminding us of our own. When can a word be said to begin? My OED digs and scratches like an archaeologist for a word’s first appearance on a page, then beneath that to its roots in bygone tongues, and sometimes beneath that, to a sound (or phoneme) in a primal language that now can only be guessed. So do I derive from parents who derived from parents who were shaped by the accidents of experience and climate of their hour. I am not writing this, not really; I’m a conduit for predecessors pressing to be heard and instrument for a purpose I can hardly discern (and may mistake) – a spigot; another of Eve’s and Adam’s proliferant progeny. An infinite inheritor, the OED is my brimming account book. Who’s luckier than I?