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If Printed Dictionaries Are History, What'll Children Sit on to Reach the Table?

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Re: If Printed Dictionaries Are History, What'll Children Sit on to Reach the Table?

#61

Post by l0b0 »

drfuchs wrote: post #10

Why, the phone book, of course. Usually the yellow pages, if you were in a reasonably sized metropolis. Nobody used a dictionary; I can’t imagine where this misinformation came from. The advantage of using a phone book was that a new one was delivered, completely for free, every year, so you just had to hang on to an old one if you were particularly fastidious, and otherwise just used the current one. And they were s…

Oh man, phone books. It's so weird that those are still delivered to possibly millions of households world wide. Why not save the environment a bit by asking to get off their delivery list?

Re: If Printed Dictionaries Are History, What'll Children Sit on to Reach the Table?

#62

Post by drewmol »

drfuchs wrote: post #10

Why, the phone book, of course. Usually the yellow pages, if you were in a reasonably sized metropolis. Nobody used a dictionary; I can’t imagine where this misinformation came from. The advantage of using a phone book was that a new one was delivered, completely for free, every year, so you just had to hang on to an old one if you were particularly fastidious, and otherwise just used the current one. And they were s…

For the younger readers, phonebooks were the ad supported contact directories that preceded search engines. They were forcefully delivered to just about any address with a landline across the country (typicaly yearly, sometimes by multiple publishers). People found alternate uses for them.

Re: If Printed Dictionaries Are History, What'll Children Sit on to Reach the Table?

#63

Post by wool_gather »

l0b0 wrote: post #61
drfuchs wrote: post #10

Why, the phone book, of course. Usually the yellow pages, if you were in a reasonably sized metropolis. Nobody used a dictionary; I can’t imagine where this misinformation came from. The advantage of using a phone book was that a new one was delivered, completely for free, every year, so you just had to hang on to an old one if you were particularly fastidious, and otherwise just used the current one. And they were s…

Oh man, phone books. It's so weird that those are still delivered to possibly millions of households world wide. Why not save the environment a bit by asking to get off their delivery list?

I don't think it's possible to "get off their delivery list"; they just get dropped on the stoop/porch/entryway, one for each mailbox. It's not like they're ever addressed to anyone personally.

Re: If Printed Dictionaries Are History, What'll Children Sit on to Reach the Table?

#64

Post by salutonmundo »

Symbiote wrote: post #56
larkeith wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had the reverse impression over recent years: dictionary sites have become so bloated and unusable, between ads, comment systems, inefficient JS, and abysmal "mobile-friendly" pages I've gone back to my old hardcover whenever convenient. I imagine part of this is use-case, however: I tend to use a dictionary infrequently, mainly when I'm reading with the shelf within reach, so the overhead of launching an app or…

I use Wiktionary — no ads, comments, and it's fast. My father had an "Official Scrabble Word List" book, which was just a list of words without definitions. An app would be even better for this: you could take a photo of the word, and it could give a simple yes/no without any chance of "accidentally" seeing other words.

+1 for Wiktionary.

As for Scrabble, https://scrabble.hasbro.com/en-us/tools#dictionary works just fine, although it needs JavaScript.

Re: If Printed Dictionaries Are History, What'll Children Sit on to Reach the Table?

#65

Post by cgriswald »

wool_gather wrote: post #63
l0b0 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man, phone books. It's so weird that those are still delivered to possibly millions of households world wide. Why not save the environment a bit by asking to get off their delivery list?

I don't think it's possible to "get off their delivery list"; they just get dropped on the stoop/porch/entryway, one for each mailbox. It's not like they're ever addressed to anyone personally.

Conveniently, mine is tossed lazily onto my driveway within reach of the recycling bin.

Re: If Printed Dictionaries Are History, What'll Children Sit on to Reach the Table?

#66

Post by salutonmundo »

newman8r wrote: post #41

I keep a dictionary and thesaurus. They're actually pretty useful when you need to think of names for projects. I personally haven't found an electronic dictionary that lets you 'browse' as well as a physical one, but if anyone knows of one I'd like to check it out.

I mean, there's word lists (like /usr/share/dict/words on Unices). Combined with an actual dictionary that allows some semblance of browsing.

Re: If Printed Dictionaries Are History, What'll Children Sit on to Reach the Table?

#67

Post by gumboshoes »

hawkice wrote: post #26

This whole article is offensive to my personal sensibilities. I suspect this is because (not that I'm as fancy as the author) I have at least a smidgen or shadow of taste, so not being able to ostentatiously display how dignified and fancy I am with a useless tome I would never reference isn't a terrifying prospect. I'll just have to develop other empty, meaningless ways to impress people, like having my think piece…

Did you even read it? I think not.

Re: If Printed Dictionaries Are History, What'll Children Sit on to Reach the Table?

#68

Post by hawkice »

gumboshoes wrote: post #67
hawkice wrote: post #26

This whole article is offensive to my personal sensibilities. I suspect this is because (not that I'm as fancy as the author) I have at least a smidgen or shadow of taste, so not being able to ostentatiously display how dignified and fancy I am with a useless tome I would never reference isn't a terrifying prospect. I'll just have to develop other empty, meaningless ways to impress people, like having my think piece…

Did you even read it? I think not.

Most other comments here answer the question in the headline. The actual body of the article is an utterly ponderous exploration of dictionaries as signalling, to which I directly respond. If anything, my comment is perhaps the most on topic.

Plus, your comment violates HN comment policy.

Re: If Printed Dictionaries Are History, What'll Children Sit on to Reach the Table?

#69

Post by JadeNB »

tokai wrote: post #49
JadeNB wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not going to loose a large part of my functional literacy, just because the power/internet goes out. Is your functional literacy really so dictionary-bound that a temporary outage makes you lose a large part of it? (Maybe it is! But I think that, for most people, referring to a dictionary, online or in print, is an occasional act.)

I would say that any persons functional literacy will be enhanced with access to a dictionary (digital or printed), unless they can the dictionary by heart. I wouldn't called that bound. I would just call it putting in your best effort. I personally confer a dictionary whenever I write more than a paragraph of text. Most people don't do that, but they should.

> I would say that any persons functional literacy will be enhanced with access to a dictionary (digital or printed), unless they can the dictionary by heart.

I agree! (Further it is impossible to know a good dictionary by heart, since it should be updated regularly.) I didn't mean to suggest that normal people don't need dictionaries, only that it seems a bit extreme to suggest that a large part of functional literacy (not just fluency or eloquence) would be lost by a temporary loss of access to one.

> I personally confer a dictionary whenever I write more than a paragraph of text. Most people don't do that, but they should.

Just this one time, I hope that it is OK for me to nit-pick and point out that you almost certainly mean 'consult', not 'confer'.

Re: If Printed Dictionaries Are History, What'll Children Sit on to Reach the Table?

#70

Post by DiffEq »

drfuchs wrote: post #10

Why, the phone book, of course. Usually the yellow pages, if you were in a reasonably sized metropolis. Nobody used a dictionary; I can’t imagine where this misinformation came from. The advantage of using a phone book was that a new one was delivered, completely for free, every year, so you just had to hang on to an old one if you were particularly fastidious, and otherwise just used the current one. And they were s…

We can't keep phone books around after my sons and I learned to rip them in half. We even glean them from neighbors and co-workers...
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