My weekend word(s)

I got out yet another dictionary this weekend: QPB Dictionary of Difficult Words. I flipped several times and here's what I came up with.

Folks, I know this is very exciting. Please stay seated and hold your applause until the end. Otherwise some words will think you like them more than other words.

bogie: wheeled undercarriage of a rail vehicle; railway coach; truck for coal, etc.

imago: adult form of insect.

pathodontia: study of dental diseases.

triplopia: triple vision.

This dictionary also clears up some issues in pronunciation: all of them riveting. I can't make pronunciation letters, so use your imagination as I help you with your next trip to the coffee shop for breakfast:

Scone: Neither [****] nor [****] has any indisputable claim to be the 'correct' form, and the choice is largely a matter of personal preference. In Britain, [****] is probably commoner, in America [****]. The word should not be confused with Scone, the name of a Scottish village, pronounced [***].

So if you mess this up and accidentally order a [***], you may be buying a Scottish village the way Kim Basinger bought a town in Georgia. Be careful out there.

Get your dictionary on and miggle with me!

"It was early morning, just about the time dawn is too sleepy to get out of bed." ~Pat Novak

Early this morning, I was on Facebook playing Scrabble. I do that every morning. I have a routine while I feed the cats, I make coffee and turn on the computer. By the time I get back to the computer, it is awake, so I open two web browsers. Oh, wait. I can’t tell you my Scrabble secrets.

I log in to Facebook and I play with a friend. We have four games going most of the time. Today I was kicking butt – I’ve been doing better lately. For awhile I was just sort of showing up, you know? I kept having such bad luck, bad draws, bad placement choices: I just threw down little two and three letter words.

I lost a lot of games.

These days, I am back to my sassy self and playing to annihilate win.

This morning, I got a word I hadn’t seen before, but caught my eye right away: miggle. Some of you may recall that I wrote a post about my favorite words and wiggle and giggle are the top two. Naturally, I needed to know what miggle meant so I could use it properly!

I put “miggle” into the Google machine and got approximately nothing. I did get two hints: a game of marbles and a West Indian tea cake or something. I went to Merriam-Webster and they said I would need to subscribe to their unabridged version.

They weren’t giving up miggle for free, folks.

So I went downstairs to the family room bookcase and pulled out my biggest dictionary. I struck out. No miggle.

I hit up Funk & Wagnalls Student Desk Dictionary (the dictionary for Children of the Cold War like myself) and it said a MIG or MiG is a Russian fighter jet. Right…born in the 60s…I knew that already. Thanks.

I opened my last dictionary, which did tell me that a mig is a marble. I wanted more information and as I stood there, I realized I was experiencing a tickle of quiet pleasure, a thrill, a wee buzz. I realized I hadn’t rifled my tips over the pages of a dictionary in a long time. I use the Google machine too much.

I love dictionaries and am the sort of person who would flip through them reading random entries to amuse myself. I play along with the word definition pages in Reader’s Digest. I have dictionaries for difficult words and dictionaries for obscure words. I do crossword puzzles now and then. I play Scrabble at 0-dark-thirty.

This weekend, I vow to do myself a favor and take some time to hold a dictionary in my hand and learn a new word. I can’t promise I will use it, because that’s just a lot of effort in a busy weekend.

I really meant all of that writing about the pleasures of a proper dictionary to transport my readers to another dimension, a time in their lives when we were all at the mercy of the school library, the dictionary and a set of encyclopedias on the shelf.

I don’t think I managed that and it’s a shame. I should try harder. I should have written about how the pages, long-closed and neglected, tickled my nose. I could have waxed poetic about the heft of the book in my hand or running my fingertip down the scallops of letters until I found the M; the flipflipflip of the pages while I tried to find the right combination of letters as the alphabetical programming in my head kicked in and I fondly remembered how much I enjoyed learning how to alphabetize in school.

Sorry about leaving that out. Now to the business at hand: miggle.

I called my local library (LOVE.YOUR.LIBRARY), which is currently running a theme called Geek Your Library and I think I should get a poster or a billboard of my own for how excited I was when she found it for me.

I called the reference desk and she looked up miggle in their unabridged dictionary. I suspect this was an online reference, because she did it in a flash without putting me on hold. She sort of found it, but the entry didn’t make sense to either of us: “dial constr.” So she offered to look in the OED…in the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary.

Right on! That’s firepower!

It wasn’t in there, but she did find it in the Random House/Webster’s unabridged dictionary, 2nd ed. 2001 (I need to give them props for having the word!). She called me back and I was smiling and giddy. We were both so surprised it wasn’t in the OED.

Miggle: a playing marble, especially one not used as a shooter. Miggles: the game of marbles. Common usage: 1890-1895.

C’mon everybody, grab a dictionary and find a word!