Welcome, young readers!

I have just learned from Studeo (what a great juxtaposition of terms!) - and learned with quite a burst of delight! - that there are people as YOUNG AS TWELVE who are reading this Blogg!!!

Welcome, welcome!

Perhaps I should apologise if I tend to use big words. I am rather big (not as big as GKC was), so I use words that I can get my fingers around. Which is why I played the bass fiddle and not the violin (my hand goes around a violin at least twice!)

But using big words is OK, because it will give you some nice easy exercise:

First. you get to flip through your dictionary to look up the words. (What! You don't have a dictionary? Quick! ask Mom or Dad to take you to the store! Don't use the INTERNET!!! I will tell you why later!) Get a good one that you can use for a while - you're going to need it. I have one (pause, reaches out left arm) right HERE and I use it even though I am big and am also a doctor.

Second. With a dictionary, you will get to do some reading of lots of words before you find the word you want, and once you read that word and its meaning and its etymology, maybe you will remember the new word. This is good, because there are lots of very nice words we have, and the poor word-farmers and number-miners and all the busy workers in the word-factories would be sad if we didn't keep using all their splendid products.

Just think of how if would be: Gerunds, Incorporated would have to pay to have tv commercials about "anaesthetizing" and "engorging" - you would see dumb-looking actors explaining the word, while an enthusiastic narrator explained the meaning...

Whew.

Ahem! Well, in any case, if you find that you need more help (even with a dictionary!) then be sure to ask your parents about posting a question. Questions can be very helpful. Did you know that Socrates used questions in order to teach his students? And did you know that the very great book called Summa Theologica by St. Thomas Aquinas is just a very large collection of questions - with lots and lots of answers - and about half the answers are wrong answers? It's amazing. And did you know that the question mark "?" is probably derived from the Latin quaestio??? (This word means "a seeking or searching".) So be sure to ask, so that you can ask. Hee hee.

Now, I said I would tell you about why you need to have the kind of dictionary which you can hold - the kind that a friend of mine calls a "tactile book"!

It is because of something our Uncle Gilbert said, when he was talking about a much more elaborate form of dictionary called an encyclopedia...

...it is the test of a good encyclopaedia that it does two rather different things at once. The man consulting it finds the thing he wants; he also finds how many thousand things there are that he does not want.
[GKC, The Common Man 240

So, welcome, young and old (who I hope are young at heart.) And if I use long words once in a while - words like "deoxyribonucleic acid" - remember that even some computer scientists know how to spell DNA. Hee hee hee.