It’s New Years day and a lot of you are probably in no mind for an over stimulating rant on one of Irreal’s hobby horses or perhaps even a technical discussion so, instead, I offer a reprise of one of my favorite posts from back in 2015. That post was about James Somers’ wonderful article on why you are probably using the wrong dictionary. Someone just reposted a pointer to the article and I enjoyed reading it again just as much as I did the first time.
Somers tells the story of John McPhee’s New Yorker article Draft No. 4. The article describes how McPhee, an acclaimed essayist, “punches up the language” of his essays after the creative work is done. He does this by looking for words that aren’t quite right or that can be improved and looks them up in the dictionary. But not just any dictionary. Somers says that most dictionaries offer dry, bureaucratic definitions but, he discovered, McPhee uses Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913 + 1828). Happily this dictionary is freely available and Marcin Borkowski discovered a way to make it accessible from within Emacs. This is perfect. You can just point at a word in an Emacs buffer and get Webster’s definition. I don’t use it all that often but when I do it’s really a life saver. If you write prose, you really need this.
I have long thought that Somers’ article was a beautiful paean to McPhee and his process for making his prose as perfect as possible. Even those of us who aren’t in his league can learn and benefit from how he does things.