fingertips. As the dictionary man, I was judge and
mates off-set, though part of me pitied her logical
executioner. Tomac and thuse are desperate
brain. Surds were absurd in my books. Who cares
nonsense, though SUMACH for argument’s sake
if 9 x 7 = 63? Does that come with a story, a
is a tree in the cashew family, while MAHOUT is
homophone, shades of nuance? In a word, no.
an elephant rider. Listed and legit.
Congratulations. Six points.
As that’s what my Macquarie embodied – depth
and deviation. Not to mention the day-to-day
Of course, finding MOUSTACHE in
serendipity of travelling through the alphabet. I
COHUSETMA was hitting the jackpot, or the Full
donated blood to its pages as the onionskin paper
Monty as we called it. Not that every letter cluster
sliced my fingers, flicking from one story to
held a complete word, but my job was digging up
another. I met bizarre origins in the small print,
what I hoped was optimal. That’s how my
like dotterel the seabird deriving from stupid, or
dictionary fetish came to be, even before the show
how the Japanese crime gang (yakuza) owes its
existed. If you want to know most words on those
name to 8-9-3 in that language: the sort of
1,940 pages, you needed to be inseparable.
numbers to turn me on.
Time has passed. The great clock of Letters and
Numbers has reached its end point, or pause point.
Nobody knows why the show was iced, but at
least I salvaged my accomplice from the set. I
don’t mean Lily, but the battered tome that now
perches on a special shelf in my home office.
Most days, to sustain my hunger, I scan a few
entries to glean more wonders, collect slang for
crosswords, or learn the secret histories behind the
words we think we know.
Being so close to a single book, I came to find its
treasures, the rare words hiding amid the mundane
A-to-Z. A freak coconut from the Philippines,
minus milk or hollow, is called the makapuno.
Meanwhile a pickelhaube is a spiked German
helmet. Living cheek-to-jowl with my green
friend, I found her blind spots too. English never
stops growing and changing, but that’s no excuse
for an Australian glossary to skip shalom or
floatie, regift or pedalo.
Lily Serna was the numbers side of the equation.
She played the glamorous apostle of arithmetic to
my mad professor of language. We became great
Free of the show, I don’t carry my Macquarie to
so many places, but we’re still tight. One gentle
touch of the page is worth a thousand words.
When you survive an intense period as a couple,
you tend to stay welded for life. Our nearness is to
be expected. For a few years there, I wasn’t just
the word man – I was the dictionary man. Which
is why, dear ArtView, I chose the Macquarie Fifth
Edition. To think the book that brims with
210,000 definitions has ended up defining me.
www.davidastle.com
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