Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Back from Barcelona: I've got beef with the dictionary!


You want to hear about Barcelona. You want to hear about Christmas. You want to hear about Maria's visit.

I want to tell you about the dictionary.

While Maria was here, we went over to dinner at our friends' Stephan and Karla's apartment. While there, we made a few very geeky discoveries. The first was that Karla and I have the same favorite dictionary. Yup, dictionary. We both favor the Longman, also known as the DCE, or Dictionary of Common English. It's a fantastic dictionary with descriptions of words in plain English. I started just recommending it to students, but since then, I've fallen in love with it myself. At any rate, we discover that we both love this dictionary and a moment later both Stephan and Karla have run to get their copies. They each own one. So there we are at the dinner table, with two of the same dictionary, expounding upon their greatness with excitement.

Then came incredibly dorky moment number two: the discovery of the mistake.


As you can see in this close up to the right, the word "don't" is spelled with two t's.

Oh the pride! The pride! The joyous honor, the delight, the glory of finding a mistake in the dictionary! "Why, only incredibly smart people find mistakes in the dictionary", I thought to myself.

In retrospect, the correct thought was probably, "Only rather obsessive people who read the dictionary find mistakes in the dictionary," but no need getting down on myself now -- I did, you know, find a mistake in the dictionary.


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Baha! Bahaaaa! Those DCE shysters. If only they knew they were going to be brought down one double-lettered mistake at a time!

Katie said...

I am shocked! I am appalled. I am also seriously impressed you found a mistake in the dictionary. Seriously impressed.

Maria said...

Snagle nail, indeed.