As long as you have a mobile device with an Internet connection handy, you're never without a dictionary. Can't remember if you should use callous or callow in the sentence you're jotting while on the go? Just look it up! This is wonderful technology. But, to impersonate an old fart Luddite for a moment, we're losing something valuable in the exchange of paging through a paper dictionary for looking up words online. We lose the possibility of stumbling across interesting words along the path to finding the word we went searching for.
If you're not sure of the spelling of a word you're typing into Dictionary.com, you simply get a "no results found" message. If you're unsure of the spelling while paging through a hardback dictionary, you're bound to get pleasantly distracted along the way by intriguing or exotic words that call out like so many carnival barkers, enticing you to step off your path for a moment to see something strange and new.
Impignoration got me tonight as I leafed through the OED en route to check the meaning of impolitic. The word beckoned from the top left corner of the page on which my destination lay, it's all-caps, bold font virtually jumping off the page to grab the attention of the random passer-by. Of course I had to stop to look. Impignoration is "the action or fact of impignorating," a verb which means "to place in pawn; to pledge, pawn, or mortgage." It's a "chiefly Scottish" term, the dictionary notes.
Ok, so maybe this isn't a term I'm going to add to my routine usage anytime soon, even with the ongoing mortgage crisis still coming up occasionally as a topic of conversation. But it was fun to take a brief side trip along the way to the definition I needed and discover an interesting new term. I could indeed have found impignoration in Dictionary.com. But only if I'd purposefully gone looking for it.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment