Sometimes You Just Gotta

Oxford English Dictionary

2nd Edition 

Version 4.0 [CD-ROM]

For several months I've been returning to the amazon.com page for the OED on CD-ROM to watch the price fluctuate, drooling as I gazed.  I told the story here about my unquenchable lust for words and their stories so I won't reiterate.

The OED has been on my wishlist for decades and the electronic version for nearly half a decade but recently my wish for it got so intense the term wish list seemed too wishy-washy so I started calling that upper tier of the wishlist my lust list.  

The OED was usually at the top but occasionally it would shake hands with one or another item that climbed over to perch on its head.  Lately that has been the Nexus 7 which I want for my primary e-reader and to give me back the portability for writing, posting and surfing that I lost when switching from my elderly netbook to this 15in ASUS Windows 8.

Well, as of this afternoon, the Nexus 7 has no competition.

Since Thanksgiving I've returned to check on it and watched the price rise and fall between $247 and $207.  I had even put it in my shopping cart when it hit $207 but I dithered over it for the next 24 hours and by the time I refreshed the page the next day it had gone back up to over $233.  I felt like kicking myself but at the same time I knew my reservations were sound--I don't have the time to install and learn my way around and my funds (back pay from SSI) are fast depleting so I set myself a limit on what I could spend per month and that Joanne.com purchase last week had reached it.

So when I found the price at $205 yesterday I actually started to pound my forehead with my palm, a bad habit I'm intent on breaking. I managed to just cover my eyes and bow my head asking silently Why couldn't you wait five days?. 

Both those reservations were still active: no time and low funds.  But on the other hand I knew I'd still feel like kicking myself when I saw it go back up above $220 in a day or three.  And on yet another hand: Sometimes you just have to make the time for the things that are that important to you.

The clincher hand that allowed me to justify taking the plunge today was that this was not a frivolous purchase.  It was much closer to a need than a simple want as it will be key in several ways to my business plans.  Besides the writing itself from posts to poems to copywriting to stories, there are the word games I intend to create and publish electronically. 

Now watch the price drop down to $197 or lower before the month of February is over.

It's suppose to arrive Saturday.

And this one is supposed to arrive middle of next week:

Encyclopedia Britannica
2009 Deluxe

In for a penny, in for a pound.

This was listed in one of the related lists on the OED page and at the price of $7.99 I couldn't resist.  For most of what I would use an encyclopedia for I don't need up-to-the-minute information.  

Plus mostly I don't use encyclopedias anymore for just looking up quick facts.  The Internet and search engines have filled that role.  

I have just always enjoyed reading the articles in encyclopedias especially the long ones on technical topics and the biographies and those for each country and state/province.  

Besides just reading articles for fun, I use them as jumping off points into topics I have only glancing knowledge of.  The encyclopedia article is just the first stop in a research project.  It gives me an overview of a topic and a list of words or phrases I can take to a search engine or library card catalog or to find my way to related articles in the encyclopedia.

So I grabbed this on my way to the checkout.

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Word Wonderlust

Oxford English Dictionary - 2nd Edition
Version 4.0 [CD-ROM]

I love words.  That's no secret.  But it's maybe not so well known that I can get lost in a dictionary or thesaurus as easily as in a story.  Maybe it is because every word has a story and every word is a story seed.  I love learning a word's whole story--its part(s) of speech, its plural/singular modes, its past/present/future tenses, it's pronunciation, its usage history, its etymology, its synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, and anagrams.  Most dictionaries and thesauruses have only 30 to 50% of all that for only 40 to 50% of currently existing words and most severely neglect the archaic and obsolete words.

There is only one dictionary that does it all for every single English word they have been able to discover going back as far as the written record goes.  That is the twenty volume OED which I've lusted after ever since I encountered it on the reference shelves at Southern Oregon University (then Southern Oregon State College) in the mid 80s.  With every volume worth over $100 it was clearly out of any price range I could hope to reach in the next decade.

Then I discovered the compact two volume boxed set with the magnifying glass for reading it.  As they didn't make it compact by eliminating words or information.  Rather they shrunk the text and enlarged the pages to cram several pages on each page.  That was still well into the triple digits then but seemed reachable.  But in the nearly 3 decades since I never quite reached it and by the early 2000s my vision had degenerated so much I feared that I would need a microscope rather than a magnifier to read it.

A few years back I was excited to read something about the OED keepers embarking on the project of digitizing the OED.  When it finally became available it was still out of my reach and customer reviews were not exactly raving.  Search and navigation was clunky  But with the recent upgrade to 2.0 they seem to be doing better.  There is also the online version available for subscribers.

I put it in my wishlist at amazon.com mostly as a way to bookmark it so I could follow the reviews and price changes.  Recently there have been significant price drops from some sellers that have me almost seeing myself reaching it if I were to stand on my tippy-tippy toes and stretch my arm until my joints pop.

Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary
2 volume set [Hardcover]

I've been over to drool over it a lot lately and one of those times I discovered this Historical Thesaurus of the OED which focuses in on the usage history of the words.  And it would have to be blue!  I am picturing it sitting on my desk so vividly right now I'm almost surprised I get nothing but air when I reach for it.  It is very new and it will be some time before it goes digital.  And as you can see if you follow the link below the picture it is quite pricey.

Recently I saw a quote from Stephen King saying that no word you find in a thesaurus is the right word.  No exceptions.  I agree with the spirit of that comment in that I do believe using a thesaurus while writing the first draft is quite questionable.  But I do think it has a role in the planning and research stages and the rewrite stage.

The first in order to learn about the difference in usage between one era and another, one country and another even one city and another, and one social class and another, and one ethnic group and another.  Also to collect jargon word specific to the professions, hobbies, jobs, and such of each character contemplating what their vocabulary is likely to contain.  This would save a lot of time during the first draft by priming the pump with the knowledge

In the rewrite it would be useful for finding more precise words when you have overused a general word like blue, or peace, or sunny, or bright.  And also for finding the right word for a character when there is a glaring discrepancy between their life experience and the words you put in their mouth on the fly.

For example a 30-something woman who dropped out of school in 9th grade and has raised two kids into their late teens in one shoddy, tiny, pest infested apartment, house or trailer after another while working multiple part time, back breaking, seasonal jobs like a fruit packing plant, tree planting for the Forestry Service, landscaping, motel maid, the shipping dock during the month or so before a major holiday, and drive-in janitor would not be using the same vocabulary as the 30-something woman ahead of her in line at KFC dressed in a power suit who had graduated from Stanford with a Master's in Marketing and Promotion and is currently doing contract work for politicians, writer's, public speakers, and media and sports celebrities while her nanny is raising her kids in an 8000 square foot 3 story McMansion.

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Danger! Books Can Change You.

Danger!
Books can change your operating system.
Are you sure you wish to proceed?
moar littrary kittehs

In honor of Banned Book Week a serious LOLcat, a presentation of an invaluable set of books about banned books accompanied by a rant likening book pricing structure to a form of suppression.


Banned Books Four Volume Set Published by Facts on File
Ken Wachsberger (general editor)

Literature Suppressed on Political Grounds by Nicholas J. Karolides
Literature Suppressed on Religious Grounds by Margaret Bald
Literature Suppressed on Sexual Grounds by Dawn B. Sova
Literature Suppressed on Social Grounds by Dawn B. Sova

These are an invaluable resource for anyone needing to research the history of book banning over the centuries.  Each book begins with an overview of its category followed by brief histories of a hundred or more books that have been suppressed somewhere at sometime--many repeatedly.

Every public and school library from middle school to college should have two sets--one for the Reference Shelves and one for checkout.  Every news organization needs at least one set for those times when attempts are being made to exclude books from curriculum or libraries. So those covering the story can have their awareness grounded in the historical context of the current hullabaloo and the facts at hand.

But unfortunately that is unlikely to happen as at $60 per book that's $240 per set.  Even the one volume version is priced at $240.  They are all hardback and use library quality binding and paper so that is almost understandable but it prices them out of range for many public school and public library districts.

There are no paperback or ebook editions that one could expect to be priced affordably for the average home reference library at any of the online booksellers and tho Infobase Publishing parent of the Facts on File imprint does show ebooks in their catalog the price is hidden until you sign in and based on their statement that they cater to educational institutions and libraries I doubt I'm even eligible to have an account with them even if I could imagine being able to pay their prices.  

In my humble opinion this amounts to a form of suppression essentially excluding those below the upper middle class and the school and library districts in their neighborhoods since they are funded by local property taxes.

I know.  That rant doesn't jive with my first statement.  Well, I made that before I found the publisher's page with the price quotes.  I stand by it.  For the essence of their value is in the impact they can have on the local and national consciousness on the issue of book banning and thus on the debates surrounding every local attempt to take a book off a public shelf or out of a curriculum.  But if over 60% of the people never encounter them that value is diminished, even nullified.

Yes.  I understand that a lot of care went into creating these books--gathering the facts and compiling them and writing the overviews for each category and the histories for each book and designing the books.  But dictionaries, almanacs, atlases, and quotation books have all managed to provide affordable editions.  It mystifies me why so many publishers can't see that more sales at lower prices would likely increase profit.

This post spun off its original axis after the first paragraph.  I fully intended this to be a several paragraph rave about these information packed reference books. I still feel as enthused as ever by the books themselves but the news about the price structure shook me up.  I believe I was harboring a bit of hope for having a set for my own reference library and that has been dashed by what I learned today.  Which soured my mood and morphed the rave into a rant.

I came close to deleting everything after the first paragraph and returning to the original intent.  But when rereading it and encountering the line comparing this price-jacking to suppression itself I realized the relevance of the rant to the Banned Book Week theme and decided to make it part of the discussion.

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A Word Wrangler's Lasso

 Masterwriter 2.0 is a suite of word-finding tools assembled into one package:

Word Families

A unique and revolutionary reference dictionary, that will open up a new world of possibilities for descriptive words and ideas.

Parts of Speech

A comprehensive list of descriptive words, with various filters including alliterations, that allow the writer to be more specific.

Phrases

A collection of over 33,000 phrases, sayings, idioms, and word combinations.

Rhymes

The ultimate Rhyming Dictionary with over 100,000 entries, 36,000 Rhymed-Phrases, and the most comprehensive list of Close Rhymes ever created. Rhymes from our Pop-Culture Dictionary are also included.

Pop Culture

A Pop-Culture Dictionary with over 11,000 icons of American and World Culture.

Dictionary

The Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary. 165,000 entries, 225,000 definitions,
and 10,000 new words and senses.

Thesaurus

The Merriam-Webster Collegiate Thesaurus. Over 340,000 synonyms, antonyms, related
and contrasted words, and idioms.

This isn't a review as I've not actually used the software yet which is why I took the tool descriptions off the MW site overview page and put them in quotes.

Not sure what to call this.  A wish-upon-a-far-flung-star?

The software was designed by songwriters for songwriters, lyric writers and poets but it looks equally useful for any kind of writer.  On the Amazon site there were two versions this one and one for the Creative Writer that did not have the Rhyming Dictionary or the Audio features that allows import of music tracks but on the MW site there was no mention at all of the Creative Writer version.

More mystifying than that was the fact that the two versions on Amazon were the same price though value had been removed and not replaced with equivalent value..  At nearly $200 with no upgrade support, a fairly steep price at that.

For unlimited upgrade support you need to lease from MW for a monthly ($9.95) or annual ($99) fee.

To further my confusion there were differences in the description of the tools between the Amazon site and the Masterwriters site.  On Amazon the dictionary and thesaurus were listed as American Heritage and Synonym Finder which I think are better choices.  Especially the Rodale Synonym Finder with its nearly one-million words which I have depended on for three decades and have long desired a searchable electronic version.

Both Amazon and MW call it version 2.0.  So the question becomes which site has the most up-to-date information?

Since I do write poetry as well as stories, essays, blog posts and the current training in copywriting, I would want the songwriter's package.

I think that pop culture dictionary and the phrase dictionary would prove invaluable for copywriting.

Besides the steep-for-me price and the wondering which thesaurus and dictionary is really on board the requirements paragraphs on both Masterwriter and Amazon lacked clarity.  I had to search out and read nearly a dozen online reviews before I was able to learn that yes, Masterwriter will run on Windows 8 tho XP is recommended.  Hmmm.  Gives me more than a bit of pause.  No explanation as to why.

Then there is the issue of the small font.  Always a concern for my visual challenges.  But I use other aps with that issue and have workarounds.

A lot to give me pause.  And yet...

And yet I still yearn.

Because the ability to search such a huge collection of words and phrases and filter by connotation, part of speech, alliteration, rhyme, intensity, number of syllables and positive/negative attributes then save them in favorites lists and collections attached to projects is the equivalent of a cowboy's lasso for the word wrangler. Not just invaluable but essential.

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Hanging With Cliff

Remember CliffsNotes? Yeah, those black and yellow striped pamphlets that provided study guides for school subjects and literature.

Well I stumbled on their official website while looking for an online glossary for Shakespeare. Found that and so much more. I've been hanging out on the site for hours.

Shakespeare is an integral part of my Fruit of the Spirit story world. My character, Estelle Starr, is a Shakespearean stage actress who has memorized every part of every play. She is also quite eccentric (some might say touched in the head) as she speaks only Shakespeare. I don't mean that she speaks in Elizabethan English, I mean that even off stage she speaks only lines from Shakespeare. Though she can range among the sonnets and other poems, it is mostly from the plays.

There is another character in the FOS story world who speaks only KJV Holy Bible. He was once a preacher who was excommunicated after a shocking incident for which he was innocent of all wrong doing. His name is Inny aka Innocence and he is the husband of Faye aka Faith who is the POV protagonist of the first novel in the planned series of novels. In the two stories from the novel which I posted for Friday Snippets last summer and fall, there were several scenes in which either Estelle Starr or Inny appeared but only one which included both of them.

Those two stories, though they can stand alone as longish short stories, are intended also as chapters one and three of the novel, The Substance of Things Hoped For. The story for chapter two remains unwritten largely because it is the story in which Inny and Estelle are introduced to each other and enter into dialog. Though I was delighted by the idea at the time I first conceived it, at some point I lost confidence in it and became intimidated. It didn't help that I lost all my notes about that scene in our 2001 move. But I can't blame that entirely since those notes had been sitting in my files for over six years before that.

When I first started working on these stories I had never heard of the Internet. I used concordances for the KJV Bible and Shakespeare. At the time I had access to the Shakespeare collection at SOSC (now SOU) in Ashland, Oregon. In case you don't know what a concordance is, it is a reference book in which every instance of every word in the referenced book(s) is indexed. Thus I can begin with a concept of the intent of their communication and look up the words that may or must be included and in that way find phrases, whole verses or monologues that can convey their meaning. (To see how it is worked out in scenes, you can find the stories through the FOS portal. Yikes! I've not updated that post as promised for quite awhile. I've posted snippets from other FOS novels in progress that need to be included there. The best scene to demonstrate the concept is probably the one mentioned above in which Estelle and Inny both participate: Part Seven of Making Rag Doll Babies and Million Dollar Maybes)

It was the discovery of a searchable Complete Works of Shakespeare online in 1997 that enabled me to finish Rag Doll Babies and start collecting promising quotes for planned scenes in other chapters. But it also spoiled me for after loosing access to the Shakespeare concordance in 1987 I'd had to resort to reading the plays and collecting the promising quotes the hard way. I had finished the first story, Of Cats and Claws and Curiosities, that way but I had purposely limited myself to Macbeth for the quotes because that play reflected the theme I wanted to emphasize.

Well recently I have decided to add a new strand of scenes to Of Cats. After I had mapped out the second chapter, Strange Attractors, and discovered that it needed to alternate between NOW and THEN just as Rag Dolls did, I decided to make that the format for all of the chapters. Besides, I was unhappy that so many very significant characters did not show up until well into chapter three and adding the THEN strand to Of Cats would give the opportunity to introduce them. It seemed appropriate then that that strand of scenes should be Faye, Julia and Wilma overseeing a high school production of Macbeth in which Cassie and Fancy perform and Briana, Fancy's daughter, debuts as a toddler and Mae Bea, Fancy's mother, in charge of costumes and Inny in charge of props and lights.

In preparation for writing that addition to Of Cats, I've set out to review Macbeth which will include rereading it of course but also watching several stage productions on DVD which I have access to through the library system. (Love Your Local Libraries!) With Ashland being home to the Shakespeare Festival and SOU's serious Shakespeare collection, it behooves even the public library system to have significant Shakespeare material available.

Which is lucky for me because I have no clue how a Shakespeare play is produced. I've never seen one in person. So I've got to research all aspects of it from costumes to props to what kinds of directions and advice Faye, Wilma and Julia would likely be giving the student actors. And since one of the trademarks of the three women's relationships is a certain amount of banter that shades into bickering, I need to familiarize myself with some of the controversies regarding the proper way(s) to produce Macbeth.

Though I have acquired several library books to aid me in this, I was please to discover that the CliffsNotes on Macbeth include an essay about the historical and contemporary issues surrounding the staging of Macbeth.

Faye's story, The Substance of Things Hoped For, is the novel I targeted at the first of the year for a sustained effort to complete a draft this year. Because of the research still necessary and several plot holes in the latter half not to mention the need to resort to searchable databases of Shakespeare and KJV every time Inny and Estelle enter a scene, I am beginning to think even sustained effort won't be enough. This was the project I designated for the Sven III aka 70 Days of Sweat Challenge too but I've not added anything but notes since it began at the first of the month. Because of that, I've missed several check-ins.

The Friday before last when I posted a snippet about a teen runaway, I remembered that I had foreshadowed her appearance in Faye's story in the same scene I linked above (part seven of Rag Doll Babies). She is the shadow that faded into the woods when Cassie stopped to give Estelle a lift. This past Friday I wrote a new scene for Crystal's story, Home Is Where the Horror Is. Since the story is set in an Oceanside, California motel much like the one Ed and I lived in for a time when he was stationed at Camp Pendleton, I anticipate little need for research which makes working with the story much less complex. I am planning to write another scene for this Friday's snippet.

If I'm to continue posting snippets and participating in Sven III, I suspect I'm going to have to start ranging over the whole of the FOS story world stories again. There are many that are much less complex than Substance.

Well, another post has gotten away with me. I began this with the intent of a quickie about a neat reference resource for readers, researchers and Shakespeare lovers. I had said all I set out to say by the end of the third paragraph. That was hours and hours ago. Before midnight! and it is now 7:30 Wednesday morning!

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Monday Poetry Train #35

print for sale at art.com

This week I'm sharing this link to a dandy little Rhyme finder: RhymeZone.

You type in the word you want rhymes for and it presents you with the results. It is much more than a rhyme finder though. It will also define your word, spell check it, give you antonyms or synonyms or homophones. It will find similar sounding words or words with the same consonants in the same order; both of which help with alliteration. It will also find the word in Shakespeare, in famous quotes, or search for images related to the word.

This is the kind of word play that stimulates word flow for me.

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Crash Courses

I've had a major slow down in word production on Spring Fever, my NaNo novel, this week. When the words stopped flowing and I found myself all in a tangle on Tuesday, (a great disappointment after such a feverish start,) I began spending more time on the various crash courses I needed to flesh out the plot and the character's lives.

See my TT this week for a glimpse into the story and an idea of how many topics are involved. It is to be expected, I suppose, when you have two professors and a grad student as major POV characters and each with special interests and needs. Below are just some of the resources I've turned to so that I can pretend myself into the mind of a poet living with MS; a professor passionate about Dante; a grad student incorporating dance and the tarot into her thesis and who gives birth twice in the course of the novel. Which reminds me, I still have to research surrogacy, embryo freezing, and midwifery. Since I'm creating this to collect my resources as much as anything else, I may have to update as I add resources.

Among the books I've been reading are:

>>Joseph Campbell's Masks of God, leaning heavily on V.1. Primitive Mythology
>>Clarissa Pinkola Estes' Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
>>Jamke Highwater's Language of Vision: Meditations on Myth and Metaphor which is organized around the Major Arcana of the tarot and gave me the idea to do the same for my story.
>>Dante's Divine Comedy--Since I have a copy in the Britannica Great Books set, I've been dipping in now and then to read a paragraph or three.
>>Also in the GB set is Aristotle's works and I've dipped into his Rhetoric and On Poetics. Something I expect a professor of Medieval Literature would know.

Always useful as a resource whenever music is involved or excerpts from documentaries might be helpful is YouTube. So when it occurred to me that Vivaldi's Four Seasons and Igor Stravinsky's ballet, Rite of Spring, might merit some kind of involvement in a story called Spring Fever, that is where I headed.

Vivaldi ~ Four Seasons

Joan Bunning's Learning the Tarot.
>>What is especially helpful with Bunning's site is the list of actions associated with each card. This is good for triggering ideas for the plot.

Emotional Toolbox. [Hat Tip Joely]

Info on living with MS

On Dante's life and works:

Dante at Wikipedia
>>but of course I've used Wikipedia for all the other topics as well.

Dante Alighieri on the Web

An Exhibition of Renaissance Dante editions.

There is a lot of Dante material at this Columbia University site but it is the collection of images they have that drew me there. It always feeds a writer's imagination to have images to look at.

Similarly, The World of Dante is a gold mine of info, texts and translations but their collection of maps is really extraordinary.

Here's a bit of fun: you can take a test to see where in Dante's Hell you will be sent.

The Dante's Inferno Test has sent you to the First Level of Hell - Limbo!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	High
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	High
Level 2 (Lustful)	High
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	Low
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Low
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Low
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)	Very Low
Level 7 (Violent)	Low
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	Moderate
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)	Very Low

Take the Dante's Inferno Hell Test

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Three Indispensable Reference Sites

There are three sites which I have come to depend on while working on my Fruits of the Spirit story world this past month. I'm going to list them here with little comment as I need to get back to work.


Think Baby Names. Let's you search for names according to their meanings. Gives many alternate spellings and has very good etymology of the names. This is important for in my story every character who is more than a walk-on carries a theme which their name points to.


A searchable King James Version of The Bible at The Electronic Text Center of the University of Virginia. Even the Apocrypha. I had never heard before stumbling on this site that the Apocrypha had been translated by the same committee that provided the KJV of the Old and New Testaments that I was raised with. But they were and just seldom included in the texts printed for Protestents. And of course, the Catholics disdained the KJV.


Open Source Shakespeare. All of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. Searchable. Why this is important for my story world will be made clear on this Friday's snippet.

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I Found A New Playground

I got so lost exploring this site, I almost forgot I still needed to post. It is nasty hot here again tonight and I'd just as soon not cuddle up with my laptop to write a long post, its exhales are like dragon breath. So I'm just going to give you a few links to my new playground(s). Its both singular and plural as they are all the children of Stephen Wolfram creator of Mathmatica.

The one I stumbled onto first, via a link in someones blog post to a definition, was mathworld. mathworld (no caps is theirs) is similar to a wiki in the way you navigate and in the way users with proper credentials can add articles. But the site itself is created with the Mathmatica software. The site is a cross between an encyclopedia, glossary and tutorial for math from High School Algebra on up.

Exploration of mathworld eventually led me to Wolfram Demonstration Project a collection of interactive graphics demonstrating mathematical concepts. These include 3D and animations. But my main interests are the ones that can lend themselves to needlepoint design. Like this one demonstrating Gaussian Primes or this one demonstrating snowflake like patterns created with hexagonal cellular automata. Or Rep-tiles.

Then there is the gallery where they show off gorgeous art created with Mathmatica and offer posters for sale. Several of these 2D designs might lend themselves to needlepoint. It makes me wish I had the Mathmatica software so I could create my own designs. But it is waaaaay out of my price range.

Here is a site map to Wolfram's web presence: Wolfram Web Resourses. He even has a blog!

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