Dictionary reading may be new fad

While cruising warily though serious moose country with an eye cast for wandering Bullwinkles, I had my car radio tuned to the Canadian equivalent of our National Public Radio. There, I happened upon a discussion by a panel of Canadian authors talking about the influences that had shaped their writing careers.

One chap said he’d been influenced by his grandfather, who had a habit of reading the dictionary for entertainment and enlightenment. My thoughts flashed back to those insipid moron jokes, kissing cousins to the knock-knock-who’s-there? jokes that we kids used to run by one another to amuse ourselves when the going got especially tedious between the annual January thaw and the start of mud season. (“Didja hear about the moron who gave up reading the dictionary because the stories were too short and they didn’t have much of a plot?”) Yuk yuk.

But the more I pictured that old geezer out there on the western prairie reading his dictionary by the light of a kerosene lamp and influencing his grandkids to get hooked on words, the more I considered the possibility that he might have been onto something, a visionary ahead of the curve when it comes to mankind’s more worthwhile endeavors. A person could probably do a lot worse than read the house dictionary from A to Z in taking his game to the next level, as hockey players and coaches are forever putting it.

The more so in an age when studies show that the average bear, in his constant hurry to get some place fast, seems to be contributing to the dumbing down of America by doing precious little reading of any kind. What better way to “cowboy up,” in the strange present-day vernacular of the Boston Red Sox, and stave off insidious vocabulary shrinkage than by turning to your dictionary for an occasional smartening-up session?

To illustrate, I open my terminally dawg-eared tenth edition of Webster’s Collegiate version at random and I learn that “furbelow” is “a pleated or gathered piece of material; especially a flounce on women’s clothing.” This is knowledge ideal for imparting to your golfing chum while he’s in the middle of his backswing.

In the “M” chapter, the book tells me that “malversation” is misbehavior, especially “corruption in an office, trust or commission.” Sounds like a handy word to have in the verbal cupboard when the conversation at tonight’s happy hour turns to the sorry California political scene inherited by Arnold,

The Austrian Terminator – dubbed “Obergropenfuhrer Schwarzenegger” by one Left Coast newspaper for his alleged penchant for groping women and his alleged youthful admiration of Hitler’s leadership abilities. “How about that malversation out in California?” a guy might ask the femme fatale bellied up to the bar next to him. Tell me that that wouldn’t be a swell pickup line for such an opportune occasion.

“Sulcus” is “a shallow furrow on the surface of the brain separating adjacent convolutions,” I see when I look randomly under “S.” But, brain that you are, you probably already knew that, any adjacent convolutions to the contrary notwithstanding.

However, are you also aware that a “zemstvo” is one of the district and provincial assemblies established in Russia in 1864? Not likely, I’d wager.

Should this dictionary-reading business catch on it can only inspire the electorate to cowboy up and take its game to the next level (see hockey players, Red Sox and vocabulary shrinkage, above).

Some might be encouraged to tackle the fine print contained in warranties, insurance policies, federal income tax forms, pre-nuptial agreements and the like as a sort of warmup drill for the reading between the lines they’ll face when confronted with the ballot for the Nov. 4 vote on the casino referendum boondoggle.

Others, the serious practitioners among us, might take on Roget’s Thesaurus, say, stem to stern. Or the Encyclopedia Britannica, every volume, every entry, until the brain threatens to explode in retaliation much as it might if forced to process an Al Gore position paper on global warming.

And in a perfect world, someone in the Maine Department of Public Safety would be inspired to read the statutes pertaining to liquor before the commissioner panics the natives with the ruling that retail sales of booze on Sunday are illegal in 132 of our finer communities.

Granted, after conferring with the attorney general the man cowboyed up and rescinded his misguided edict. But jeez, Louise …

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.