I think dictionaries don’t get the kudos they deserve

There’s something you should know, if this thing between us is going to get more serious.

I’m mad about dictionaries. I think it I get it from my father. Every so often, he would collapse the newspaper, and say “I must look up the meaning of that word now”, and then go off down to the sitting room and get out the dictionary. He’d stand there searching through it, but not for long. Repeated trips to the dictionary had made him adept at getting close to the word on first opening.

After a while he streamlined the process when he looped a string down the spine of the book thus allowing it to be pulled out more quickly. It knackered the spine a bit, but the dictionary, the one good thing that we ever got out of a Reader’s Digest offer, could take it.