I took the day off from work on Wednesday. It was partly a mental health day, and partly a there’s-no-way-in-hell-I’m-dragging-myself-into-the-office-today-because-I-couldn’t-fall-asleep-until-3:30-in-the-morning-last-night day.

I wound up going to the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. All week I’d been obsessed with the Oxford English Dictionary, and I just desperately wanted to peruse it. I didn’t want to spend hundreds of dollars for my own 20-volume edition, or a little less for the compact one-volume version with tiny print and an ineffective magnifying glass or the CD-ROM or a $550 yearly subscription, and my local library didn’t have the latest OED in any form (although it did have the Oxford Latin Dictionary, which I perused and which seems just as drool-worthy, or would if I knew Latin). So I went to the main branch of the New York Public Library in midtown, sat down at a computer terminal in the enormous, ornate, high-ceilinged Rose Reading Room, and accessed the OED online.

I’ve been really interested in the foundations of the English language lately, so I looked up really basic words. I looked up the, I, be, have, do, the letter W (one of the most recent additions to our alphabet), and the diphthong th, because English used to contain separate characters (thorn and eth) for that sound.

Each of the definitions was really long, going into the origins of each word. (For instance, the various permutations of “be” — am, are, is, was, were, be, been — originally come from three separate verbs.) The OED online has an e-mail function, so I e-mailed each of the definitions to myself for printing out and perusing later. It was a pretty neat afternoon. Also I got to look at hot guys.

On a completely unrelated note, I’m trying to figure out why my social life sucks lately.
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