Reference Works

My good old Random House fake-Webster’s Dictionary, dating back to some time before the end of the Paleolithic, has just flat worn out. And my Chicago Manual…yes, I’m afraid it’s still the 15th edition. I’ve dawdled on getting a new one, because the current rules can be found online, with some hassling around, and because I’m stone-lazy and flint-cheap. Characteristics, I suppose, that are appropriate to a survivor of the Stone Age. I need new reference works! In honor of our latest client, whose project we’re very enthusiastic about doing and who uses Chicago, I decided to get brand-new hard copies of both these key tools.

And I wanted them now, not three or four days from now.

So drove over to the nearest Barnes & Noble, situated in a decrepit shopping center on the Interstate 17. And yes, they do have Chicago 16. But… If you want to buy it in their brick-&-mortar store, you pay a 10% surcharge unless you cough up private information and get a goddamn “member card!” Order it online, and they don’t extort the personal factoids…but of course you have to give them your name, phone, number, and address to get them to ship the stuff to you. I said I thought not.

Momentarily considered driving to the Great Desert University’s westside campus, but then remembered how the bookstores at that grand institution gouge the customers, and so decided to go home and do what I should’ve done in the first place: order it from Amazon. Better one monolithic corporation than two should snarf up my personal information

Got Chicago for the same price and Oxford New American Dictionary for $5 less than B&N charges. Good enough for government work.

For day-to-day use, I really prefer a hard-copy to a digital reference work. There’s a number of reasons for that.

Chicago’s online site, which is very good, takes you right straight to the answer to your question (assuming you’ve framed the question right). And that’s nice. But sometimes I’m better served by being able to browse the closely or tangentially related sections that appear either close by the relevant section in the text or under the main heading in the index. If nothing else, understanding ancillary issues adds to my expertise. And sometimes I discover that in fact, I’ve asked  the wrong question, and there’s a better solution to what Author needs to do.

As for the dictionary… I have yet to find an online dictionary that suffices for professional work. Maybe one is out there, but it hasn’t come to my attention. The iPad apps I’ve seen leave a great deal to be desired. Web-based dictionaries are OK if all you need is the probable spelling and a brief definition. But if you want to know something about a word? Look it up. On paper.

Then we have the locale factor. I don’t do all of my work perched on an uncomfortable chair in front of an eye-glazing computer screen. Sometimes I read copy on the sofa. And as for copyediting those wonderful detective novels: they’re bed-time reading. When, come midnight, I’m comfortably hunkered under the sheets with the dog snuggled by my side, the last thing I want to do is get up and trudge into my office and turn on the computer to look up some word or style matter. This will require me to lift the awakened dog off the bed and let her outside (for she will demand to go out), and the whole process will consume ten minutes…to accomplish a task that could have happened in 10 seconds if I’d had a real dictionary sitting on the nightstand.

Online reference works have their uses. But real ones still can’t be beat.

Image: Title page of A Dictionary of the English Language, written by Noah Webster.  Yale University Manuscripts & Archives Digital Images Database, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Public Domain.