It’s the last day of The DOTY Project trial, marking and/or celebrating lesser-known occasions as listed by daysoftheyear.com. It’s been a fun and varied week and I wish it were carrying on for at least another seven days, as that would cover Chocolate Cupcake Day (yum!), Hagfish Day (ewww!) and Caps Lock Day (SHOUTY SHOUTY!). Still, the full project will start on 1st January 2012 and continue until 31st December, covering all 366 days of that leap year.
It was a nice way for me to end the week as I’m a lover of words and the books that reference them, and today just happened to be Dictionary Day. But it made me think how only three years ago, when I started writing my first book, I invariably used printed versions of these resources, from a traditional dictionary and thesaurus to a rhyming dictionary, dictionary of phrase and fable, slang dictionary, dictionary of synonyms and antonyms and even a dictionary of art terms. These days I get all of this information online as I’m writing, saving myself time and paper cuts but not fully appreciating the secondary point of a dictionary: the browse factor.
It’ll sound sad to many people, but I used to love flipping through the pages to find the word I needed, only to first read a dozen other entries that caught my eye. Listings the likes of lollapalooza, ragamuffin, zigzaggedly, bucolic, magnanimous, prosaic, ephemeral, asinine and phantasmagoria; strange forms that would not so much leap off the page as pull you into it. Then there’s one of my all-time favourite words: interrobang.
An interrobang is a nonstandard punctuation mark that combines the question mark (sometimes called the interrogative point) and the punctuation mark (known in printers’ jargon as the ‘bang’). If there were ever a political party that held the addition of this symbol to all computer keyboards as one of their policies, I’d be crossing their box in a flash! I was going to paste an interrobang into this text as it’s easily found online, such as on its Wikipedia entry, but just in case someone has a browser that doesn’t appreciate boldly peculiar punctuation, I’ve added it as an image. Isn’t it beautiful?Anyway, I feel I’ve gone off on a tangent. To celebrate the day I spent a while skimming my Collins English Dictionary (Seventh Edition 2005), digesting the definitions of bedim (to make dim or obscure), saturnism (another name for lead poisoning) and kaka beak (an evergreen climbing shrub), among others. I then visited Dictionary.com and played Word Dynamo, achieving between 77 and 100% in various games. (I admit that I got the meaning of uropygium wrong, but I did get bumptious right.)
But halfway through the day, another occasion was added to the DOTY website for 16th October: Steve Jobs Day. Now, I can’t say that this took me by surprise because I’d already read about it online, but suddenly I had to come up with a way of showing my respect for the recently departed innovator, co-founder of Apple Inc and one of the true forward thinkers of recent years. Still, I didn’t have to ponder over this for long, as it gently hit me that I was typing on a Mac, listening to music through iTunes whilst charging my iPod. I’ve been a Mac man (that sounds like a game character) for over ten years and could never be persuaded to use anything else at home. So, though quick and simple, I posted this tweet on my Twitter feed:#stevejobsday, remembering the man who made one lower case letter a symbol of our time: iMac, iPod, iPhone, iTunes, iPad. Steve, iThankyou.
And now I reckon it’s time for me to wrap up this post and say farewell to The DOTY Project, but only for seventy-six days as that’s when the full version begins. How exciting / thrilling / intoxicating / electrifying / invigorating!
Check out #dictionaryday and #stevejobsday on Twitter and see how others around the world are marking these occasions.
Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.
Samuel Johnson, Lexicographer
I want to put a ding in the universe.
Steve Jobs
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