When I was a kid, my Mom had in her study the largest book I had ever seen: the Merriam-Webster unabridged dictionary. I remember the spine being about 8 inches long, but since I was smaller back then my scale might be skewed. The dust jacket was blue, with a white circular logo on the cover and the usefulness of the book was evident in the jacket's wear and tear. I haven't seen the book in years, and I'm not even sure if my Mom still has it, but today it came in handy.
Not the actual physical book, of course, but the online version. This morning, I received an email with the word "miscreance" in it. When I replied and clicked on GMail's "check spelling" feature, miscreance was highlighted as an incorrect word. Immediately, I tried googling for miscreance; the lack of a link in the upper-right hand corner led me to think that the email sender made up a word. But, as a last attempt, I tried dictionary.com. Lo and behold, miscreance is actually a word:
Miscreance\Mis"cre*ance\, Miscreancy \Mis"cre*an*cy\, n. [OF. mescreance, F. m['e]cr['e]ance incredulity.] The quality of being miscreant; adherence to a false religion; false faith. [Obs.] --Ayliffe.
Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.
Being the game-player that I am, the first thing I noticed is that Miscreance is capitalized (and thus not a valid Scrabble play), but didn't seem like a proper noun. Then I read the source, and saw that the unabridged dictionary provided me with the definition.
But then I wondered, now in the digital age, what's the point of having two different dictionaries? Either an array of letters is a word or it isn't. (Though some of my PoMo friends might disagree with me on that point.) An online unabridged dictionary is just as user-friendly and uses only marginally more resources than an abridged version. People don't surf their way to unabridgeddictionary.com when dictionary.com doesn't suffice. Potentially the only hope for the term "unabridged dictionary" is that Merriam Webster continues to (try to) make money off this antiquated concept.
Perhaps I'll ask my Mom to keep her copy of the great big, blue reference book around so one day I can show my kids what the world was like before terabytes were sold at the corner store.
Don't start writing the printed dictionary's obituary yet! Keystrokes will never compare to the feeling of awe that comes from opening one of the twenty volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary (widely considered to me the most complete record of the English language.)
Also, miscreance is not a proper noun. I don't know why it's capitalized there.
Of course getting one's hands on the twenty volume OED might be difficult...I remember Harvard not letting us MIT kiddies in their library doors. Though maybe SLC has a copy you can use.
Also (and only because you make fun of my sentences):
widely considered to me the most complete...
Wow, did you have to hire a polling company to survey that n-size of 1? ;)
About that typo... did you note the time at which that was posted?! And it's a bit rich of you to go after my grammar, considering that your entire blog reads like it should have been written in crayon! Do you think you write for the New York Times op-ed pages or something? ;-)
Turns out the NYT was correct in their editorial, the idiom can be "hone in" or "home in." Dictionary.com indicates that "home in" came first.
MISCREANCE is not allowable in North American Scrabble, but it IS allowable in the rest of the English-speaking world:
http://thepixiepit.co.uk/cgi-bin/scrab/scrabLookup.pl?search=miscreance
(TWL98 = the North American dictionary, SOWPODS = worldwide English)
As they say on slashdot: +1, informative
Thanks, Seth!
With that knowledge in hand maybe next time we play you can beat me ;)