I’ve had this post in my blog-ideas queue for some time but it’s always seemed too far afield from Irreal’s interests—being about writing and dictionaries, and stuff—to write about. Now, happily, I’ve found the perfect hook. I wrote previously about DuckDuckGo bang shortcuts and gave some examples. Another example is !webster which takes you to the 1913 + 1828 Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary. Why should you care?
The answer to that is in James Somers’ beautiful post, You’re probably using the wrong dictionary. In it, he describes a New Yorker article, Draft #4, by the prose stylist John McPhee. In that article, McPhee explains that the fourth draft comes after he’s done all the creative work and is ready to “punch up” his language. His main tool for doing that is to identify words that aren’t quite right or perhaps present an opportunity to do better and then look those words up in the dictionary. Note that it’s dictionary not thesaurus.
The problem, says Somers, is that most dictionaries are dry and give efficient, juiceless definitions. Although McPhee doesn’t say what dictionary he uses, Somers was able to track it down—it’s Webster’s Revised Unabridged, of course—and add it to his dictionary app. You really have to read his post to see why that’s worthwhile but if you’d like to improve your writing it’s well worth the read.
After reading Somers’ post, I bookmarked the dictionary but it was a bit of a pain to look up the bookmark. It would be easy to add some Elisp to pop me into the right definition in my browser or perhaps even the in the minibuffer the way abo-abo’s excellent define-word package does but I don’t use it that often so it never seemed worthwhile. Now with the DuckDuckGo bang shortcut it’s really easy and I’ll probably start using it more. Maybe enough to justify writing the Elisp.
UPDATE: he → he’s; prefect → perfect; unabdridged → unabridged
