Dictionary Day 1

Dictionary Day¶

ferruginous (fer-rö’jin-us) a. 1. Of the color of iron-rust. 2. Impregnated with iron. [L. ferrugineus – ferrugo, iron-rust – ferrum]

The antique box was hoisted off the dusty attic shelves revealing to the sisters a pile of ferruginous wooden handtools, stained with years of their great grandfather’s hopes and dreams.

The Dictionary Day Exercise¶

In what I am reluctantly coming to understand as the age of AI, I have started noticing that it has become harder for me to think of the right words I want use when writing or speaking. I used to have such a fluid use of language during my school days and I remember clearly being proud of my ability to articulate clearly. Nowadays, I am lucky if I have an opportunity to use “five dollar word” once in a few months. To add to that frustration, my regular speech was jokingly accused of being AI a few years ago (intended as an insult) and I have since been frustrated that either my style of speech has become so drab as to be confused with AI, or that the act of being able to speak at all has somehow become a social signal of being in the ‘out-group’ in a strange resurgence of highschool mentality.

While digging through an antique store over this past weekend, I found an old, worn copy of Laird and Lee’s Websters Dictionary published around 1922 and I decided I would go back to an exercise I was forced to do in my college days - which I thought then was a stupid waste of time; I will pick a random page, find a word I don’t know, write the definition, and then write a sentence using the word.

I plan to continue to do this exercise regularly before every blog post. I also plan to writing more blog posts and not being too precious about them. I have a decent number of blog posts that I have delisted because I simply didn’t like them much. I hope that writing more by hand, without a real purpose, will be the antidote to my frustrations with the AI psychosis that seems so ubiquitous these days.

A Little Town Newspaper¶

Over this past weekend, I (and by I, I mean mostly prompting an AI, because frustratingly it is wildly effective and the internet is almost wholly unusable these days) set up a project that I’ve wanted to try for a couple years now. I got a 32” Samsung e-paper display and configured it to display the front page of the New York Times every morning for me to wake up to and read. The actual code and set up process for this project is kind of uninteresting because it has been well documented elsewhere, but after setting it up, I started looking for other newspapers that would be more relevant to my life. This afternoon, curiousity struck my poor, mushed brain and I looking up whether this small town I moved to recently had a newspaper. I was delighted to find that not only did we have a newspaper, but it was the most quaint and cute newspaper I’ve ever seen.

Our town newspaper is, as one might expect, hyperlocal. It only publishes twice a week, and it primarily focuses on the local highschools, some sports, the fair or local fruit festivals coming up, and annoucements about when local property tax bills were shipped out. However, it was the opinion pieces and history pieces made me instantly fall in love with it.

I found a recent history piece about a man in the town from the early 1900s who staunchly “stood his ground” after shooting his neighbor’s horse who repeatedly and seemingly maliciously kept eating his garden, despite his repeated complaints and cries. The whole story was actually quite cute, and the fact that some editor spent their afternoon researching this old, frustrated man and his story made me quite happy. It reminded me a story told in one of my favorite books recently, An Almost Complete History of Moose in New Zealand, of old news clippings reporting on a person in a small town in New Zealand complaining publicly about wild moose eating his garden on a daily basis before he, too, shot the offender. Compared to the kinds of reality distorting horror shows that make the news these days, a local report of a grumpy gardener feels so simple and almost comical. It is a cute reminder that I don’t need to spend my energy getting upset about the state of the world, I could spend my time being just as upset about something simple and local that actually affects my life.

The world will not remember my opinions about politics or the destructive technological revolution I seem to be living in, but the world has seemed to remember these two old men who really hated an animal eating their garden. Surely, I, too, can point my energies towards resolving the minor frustrations of my daily life instead.

Later, I dug through the opinions section of the paper and realized that there is one person that seems to regularly write in more than anyone else. This person appears to be a retired local judge, whose writing style feels so human and pleasant to read. He writes mostly about his opinions on politics or the world, and does so elegantly, but seems to often include details about his personal life for no reason. His piece announcing his retirement talked about his wife retiring as well, he has written about seeing more of his grandchildren or other life events. It makes the paper feel like a proper community paper - like people, with opinions and experiences actually live around me and have more to their lives than the high contrast, prone to drama discussions I often am forced to encounter online. Reading through this man’s updates in the paper makes me want to write in and see if I can elicit a response piece from him some day.

I’m looking forward to engaging more with my new town and new community. The fact that I have a local paper which humans still write and humans stll read in this day and age brings a sense of humanity back to my life which I feel like I’ve been sorely missing for a while now.