We think nothing of buying a 26-pound turkey for Thanksgiving, 15 pounds of ribs for the neighborhood BBQ, two pounds of apples from the farmers’ market in September. But something about 10 pounds of words just doesn’t sound right.
I’m the kind of driver that brakes –or U-turns—suddenly for garage sales. There was that $50 oak desk I snapped up one summer, now serving as a worktable out in the barn. The 50-cent toaster we used for almost 20 years. The $5 easy chair that anchored five different living rooms over a seven-year span.
This time it was a book. A book in a beautiful navy blue slipcase. Sitting in the middle of the driveway. As I sped past, I could just make out what appeared to be Ox—- Eng—D—emblazoned on the cover. Enough to make a U-turn and whip in behind an aging Mercedes for a closer look.
This was no ordinary book. This was the Compact Oxford English Dictionary. Amazon sells it for $399.95 in a slipcase with a reading glass.
Well, the driveway version was missing the reading glass, but the slipcase was intact and the price was unbelievable. 10 pounds of words for only $10?
A veritable feast for a dollar a pound. Words like osmoregulation and quaverous, dripping with syllables and juicy with vowels. Six hundred years of history packed into rubbish. Enough words to populate . . . well, to populate a language.
Keep your New York strips and filet mignons. I’ll take 10 pounds of words. And a magnifying glass.
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