New Words

I love learning new words. I may not have a chance to use them but I love to learn them. I took one year of Latin and three years of French. I grew up speaking Polish. I can mostly figure out a word I do not know from the root. And I am proud of that.

It has been a long time since I had to read a book with a dictionary in hand because I am..ahem..older now and know more words. I still keep it handy but since I got Kindle for PC, I do not even really need my paperback dictionary.

How fascinating it is to me that on Kindle you can just highlight a word that you do not know while you are reading and get a dictionary definition. Not that it is a big deal but you no longer have to put down one book and pick up another.

The reason I bring this up because in the book I am reading now (one of them anyway) the word rucksack came up (look it up!) and I knew that word from that old movie Trading Places where, at the end, Jamie Lee Curtis asks the guy chasing Akroid and Murphy to "Please to help me with my rucksack?". All these years (and look at how old that movie is if you do not know) although she obviously had a backpack on I wanted to know what a rucksack was. Today I found out.

So I fought so hard hating ebooks and now you better now try to take them from me. But long live the unabridged dictionary!