When I was a little kid I loved to go through the dictionary. I generally skipped those little dictionaries they make just for school children, and went straight for the big grown-up one.<\/p>\n
It was fun just to turn the pages, go through the alphabet, and see what I might find. Usually I was on the hunt for new words.<\/p>\n
I was particularly drawn to words that seemed exotic, or odd sounding, or just plain surprising. Some words didn’t turn out to mean what I thought they would, whereas other words seemed to fit their meanings perfectly.<\/p>\n
Sometimes I would spend hours just looking for really great words, learning what they meant, and how they might be used in a sentence. The dictionary turned out to be a vast and endlessly fascinating world.<\/p>\n
We now live in a digital age where dictionaries are on-line. Kids don’t need to deal with old fashioned physical books, since meanings and usages can now just pop right up on their screens.<\/p>\n
But that means that they aren’t exposed to the kind of random exploration which I enjoyed as a kid. They may never get a chance to experience the delightfully arbitrary juxtaposition of words that just happen to be alphabetically near each other.<\/p>\n
Our current digital age is wonderful and empowering — we are traveling on an exciting road to the future. But sometimes I feel sad about the things that might have gotten lost along the way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I was a little kid I loved to go through the dictionary. I generally skipped those little dictionaries they make just for school children, and went straight for the big grown-up one. It was fun just to turn the pages, go through the alphabet, and see what I might find. Usually I was on … Continue reading “Dictionary”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27187"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27187"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27188,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27187\/revisions\/27188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}