What Santa Brought Me

On the first day of Christmas ... well, a couple of days early, for practical family reasons ... my wife and kids (two of them in absentia) presented me with a gift bag containing a lump of charcoal and an egg dyed green. It did not take me long to deduce that they stood in for a very trendy (and I say that in a positive way) piece of equipment used for grilling and smoking. 

Yum. I so have spring fever.

But on this fifth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me ... a dictionary.

So, as you can see, not just any dictionary. This is the Mother of All Dictionaries (the ones in English, at any rate). It's a twenty volume set, only a small fraction of which I will ever read before I bequeath them to my children, who will undoubtedly squabble over them voraciously.

The first edition was published eighty years ago (hence, the numerals on the graphic). This is the second edition, which came out in 1989. So it is, in some sense, obsolete. But it was obsolete before the ink was dry; such is the fate of any snapshot of a living human language. 

I have long been, in the true sense of both these words (look them up in your OED!), an amateur philologist. So this is an exciting gift. I will leave you with this tidbit from the opening entry, on the letter A:

3. In Abstract reasoning, hypothetical argumentation, Law, etc. A means any one thing or person...

1866 (in Bowen Logic iii, p. 49) Every conceivable thing is either A nor not-A. Of course, A and not-A, taken together, include the universe.

Ponder that!