So I have been getting the word of the day email from oed.com for a bit more than a year now. Initially it was just to feed my word nerding and then for a bit it turned into my doodle project, OEDoodles, but that fizzled out. I have long loved the OED, big and dusty and imposing. Kept on a special stand, a pulpit of sorts, with tissue thin, crackling pages, I have always thought of it as one of the sacred texts of the library. But then I keep libraries a bit sacrosanct anyway (something I would occasionally wrangle with past colleagues about - you want a coffee bar in an academic library? Dude, it is a LIBRARY. It is not the mall.). My earliest memories of the OED is looking up the histories of dirty words in it in middle school. Dirty words always have the longest and best entries. Once for being too loud, a teacher made us copy the entry for 'quiet.' What a great teacher.
We are a words-loving house. Here Scrabble words have to be used in a sentence, none of this memorizing lists BS. Okay, memorize the list, but memorize the meanings as well. And Timmy is basically a machine when it comes to boggling. And Alfie, man that kid slays me, already he loves letters and reading. We go round and round picking out the letters in the house, in magazines, on signs. I imagine he is not so exceptional or a genius or anything, (cut me some slack, this is my first go round with a kid, I don't know how it works) but I am just amazed at how genuinely interested he is in letters, how he will rearrange them on his little magnet board for as long as his attention span will stretch. I just didn't know kids were like that, I just didn't know it started so early.
On the way in to daycare, the sun at the perfect place in the sky to blind us, we talked about shadows. Or I talked about shadows and Alfie listened. And he said the word shadow for the first time in his life. Wow. To have first words, first concepts, that seems to happens so rarely to me, to grown-ups. Nevermind that light and shadow are pretty big, metaphorically heavy concepts and probably not the first things to come to a two year old mind. More likely the long shadows of trees falling across the street, being covered in the cool shadow of a tall building and the sun pin-pointed in the windows of the building opposite were clearer.
That is probably one of the most rewarding part of parenting so far, to actively participate in one person's history. Even in the small ways, even just the histories of their words. A short drive on a November morning will probably never make it to the pages of the OED, but even if he doesn't remember, in the entry for shadow in his personal history of words, there it is.
This is really fun, WM. I could see it as the last-page essay in a hip parenting magazine (none of those non-hip ones, of course...). Also, we should all play Scrabble sometime. I'm frightened, but excited.
Posted by: Sarah | November 11, 2011 at 12:35 PM