by Michael Johnson

Last week I thumbed through three of my bulky English-language dictionaries, trying to understand the meaning of “chops”, of which an American comedian said he had some to spare. My dictionary collection failed me but finally I found the definition in a two-minute search of the internet . “Chops” apparently means “skills”.

I was still not happy. We modern-day Luddites (I am 87) hate stooping to the web for dubious factoids, preferring to get our answers from well-edited books including our old dictionaries that were printed with ink on fine-fibre paper. Those books are now disappearing into a hungry maw called the internet.

Dictionary publishers are scrambling to find ways to salvage their learning, their categories, their definitions, their spinoffs. The last major American dictionary maker, Merriam-Webster (“America’s Most Trusted Dictionary”) has just laid off 12 editors while publishing a new edition of its Collegiate Dictionary. Some of their spinoffs seem unworthy of M-W’s great academic legacy. Today you are offered IQ tests, a variety of word games and puzzles, something called “fun with words”, and, my favorite, a daily feed of insults culled from Shakespeare’s prose.

Perhaps the saddest case of the tumult in the dictionary business is the monumental Oxford English Dictionary (OED), my 1970 printing, 6th edition, totaling 17 volumes including four supplements. At great expense, I have lugged them from New York to Paris, to London, back to Paris and finally to Bordeaux. But where will they land when I am gone? I can’t take them with me, I can’t sell them. I can’t even give them away. The demand disappeared into the hungry internet maw. It’s like my Baldwin piano. I will have to pay to get them hauled away for landfill.

The OED editors probably see the irony of their own entry: “Obsolescence. The process of gradually falling into disuse or growing out of date; the becoming obsolete.”

What’s so thrilling about the OED’s 500,000-plus words and the complete history of each one? To me, it’s a fascination with the origin of words, the rich history of the English language, and an erotic, sensual feeling. Like any bibliophile, I delight in rustling the OED’s fine cotton-fibre paper, brushing it with my fingertips and caressing the embossed letterpress printing impressions. It even smells good. I sometimes take a step back and just stare at it. I haven’t started talking to it yet, but that day may come. A friend goes further, speaking of “the tactile and intellectual attraction of hugging a big book”.

Word freaks in their 80s and 90s choke up discussing what to do with these dinosaurs when their day comes. Nobody seems to have cracked this one. My own daughter volunteered to help me deal with those precious obsolete OED volumes. She said she had the solution: “I could drive over, load them in my car and take them to the dump.”

And a Boston suburban matron, replying to my offer to give her the 17 volumes, retorted: “Why would I want 21,730 pages of OED when I can look up anything I want on the internet – and I don’t need a magnifying glass to do it? No thank you.”

Disposal of the printed word extends to other reference books, sliced and diced to reach new, smaller audiences. A journalist friend has a shelf of these monuments in the original, all rarely opened today. When he was based abroad as a correspondent, the word bug bit him. He ordered the 30-volume Encyclopedia Britannica, complete with its own mahogany bookcase. It provided many hours of curiosities that popped up unexpectedly from page to page. In his possession for 45 years, it still decorates his Connecticut living room but has “fallen into disuse”, as the OED would put it. His daughters are busy with their frantic modern lives, and friends don’t have room for it in their homes.

But I may have found the final solution for all of us, prompted by car-lovers who occasionally bury their favorite models with them. Pontiacs, Corvettes, Mercedes have all been immortalized in press coverage, one with the owner’s corpse at the wheel.

When my time comes, I want my OED packed into my casket and buried discreetly with me in some sunny cemetery in the South of France. I can then rest in peace.