February 28

I tend to take a rather casual approach to the proofing of my writing. Oh, on occasion, I have been known to pick up a dictionary and actually look up a word but for the most part, I let spell check handle that sort of business. I think, however, in the future I am going to look words up in a couple of dictionaries, both online and off. Why? Isn’t that just a useless waste of time? Isn’t one dictionary enough? Aside from the fact that wasting time is something I’m good at, on the 28th in 1939 an editor at G and C Merriam Company (later named Merriam-Webster) was thumbing through the firm’s product line and came across the word ‘Dord’ in the second edition of the companies’ New International Dictionary. Puzzled because the definition of the word, ‘noun, Physics & Chem. Density’ lacked its entomology he investigated further. He found that Dord is not a word. The Science editor at the company had sent a rather sloppily written entry to the writers and his note ‘D or d’ was more of a question than a word. My guess is that some poor proofreader lost their job over that one slipping through. However, if someone were to send me a tee shirt with Dord on it I certainly wouldn’t object.