March 9th, 2010

OED, you know me.

you can access the oxford english dictionary- the greatest dictionary ever -for free on line with a boston public library card.

i have the micro print 2 volume version- the one where you have to use a magnifying glass to read it.having it for free on line seems unbelievable.

of course such a thing is useless in a world where one breaks words down into bits and adds z's to make it all plural.i went to college with people who could barely read. i can only imagine it's gotten worse. recently i sat down with 2 books that i found jarring. not only were they poorly and sloppily written but were filled with so many misspellings, heaps of punctuation gone bad and possessives gone horribly wrong amid the glaring typos i could barely read them. the saddest part is that neither were works of fiction or free verse poems- one was a biography and the other was a history book. don't they have editors anymore or was that out sourced to another country with english as a perhaps distant 3rd language?

being stuck in spanglish hell for so long i am surprised i can even speak and write english anymore. it's really depressing when you realize you haven't had an interesting conversation in any language with anyone in months. do people even have conversation anymore or do they just text abbreviated english at each other over their phones or tweet stunted shit at their sundry devices?

"if i try my very best/you know i never could say anything in 20 words or less"