tides of emotion

You may have thought of the dictionary as a cold and unfeeling place where rationality rules but every so often I am reminded that people have uses for the dictionary that the editors never intended.

Crusades have been launched to rid the world of hate and cruelty and sadness by asking editors to remove offending words from the dictionary.  All derogatory words should be expurgated.  Cancer should be deleted so that the disease will disappear.  Even the attempt to ban the word youse is an attempt to make the world a better place.

On the other hand others have suggested that God should be the first word in the dictionary and the definitions should make up many pages.

Words that delight the soul are lifted from here and there and stitched together into a word reverie, with permission requested from the dictionary publisher of course.  Although I always thought that request for permission was perhaps just an excuse to share the joy of the rearrangement with someone who presumably understood the power of such a construct.

And now I have a young man who wants me to change the entry for beauty, take away the meanings that are there and replace them with the one meaning, Sia, because Sia is ‘the most important person in the wholeeee world’.  The contributor tells me that the entry is formal and that he has heard it everywhere. A nice touch!