Thanks Gramma Jan and Aren’t you Jealous Dorothy?

When I was back in North Dakota two weeks ago, my Gramma Jan asked me if I wanted to take any special books with me when I moved. Gramma Jan is a reader, and she has an extensive library. Whenever I wanted to read something while I was a teenager, I just traipsed across the driveway and in through the backdoor of my grandparents’ house and came clomping back home with a stack of books: novels, poetry, memoirs, and strange reference books that you don’t find lots of people buying. From the time I was a preschooler, Gramma Jan has been modeling good reading habits, and I did take a bunch of books home with me to Minnesota.

I asked if I could have her gigantic Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Gramma Jan loves dictionaries. This enormous dictionary, with print so small that the set comes with its own magnifying glass so that you can read the eensy weensy words on the skin thin pages is special to me because I can remember being a preschooler and the dictionary being delivered to my grandparents’ house. It sat on a special dictionary stand in the office, and I played a lot (very carefully) with that special magnifying glass, searching out neat letters of the alphabet.

Later on in college, I actually USED the library’s copy of this amazing dictionary to write the most tedious paper I’ve ever written, when I disected a portion of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (one of my favorite short stories) to portray the author’s use of grammatical structures and word etymology in her style.

This isn’t a dictionary that you sit down and read, which my sister-in-law Dorothy (another English major) and I sometimes do just for fun with my regular copy of the Oxford American Dictionary and Thesaurus, but I just love walking to the top of the staircase and seeing the dictionary peeking out of my office at me, there in case I want to know the word origin and history of pretty much any word in the English language, as long as I have a magnifying glass handy.