21,730 pages. . .one perfect word

Any recent decline in the popularity of reading, especially reading long books, appears to have totally bypassed Ammon Shea. Shea recently spent a year reading the Oxford English Dictionary, and his book about the experience, Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages, drops today.

When I first heard about Shea's project, I wasn't especially inspired. What is an "expert dictionary reader" anyway? And who wants to read a book about reading a book - especially a dictionary? It's not that I don't love dictionaries. I keep a massive unabridged Funk & Wagnalls flopped open in my dining room (it's circa 1930s - not sure exactly, because some long-ago student tore out its title page and publication date). The OED is, of course, the dictionary of dictionaries. But reading it from front to back? Isn't that too . . . constrained? Boring, even?

However, Shea began to charm me at the OUPblog, with his personal story of another dictionary:

It's easy to tile the floor with a book, as long as you don't much care about the long-term health of the floor you are tiling, or the book that you are using for tiles. The book that I chose was a copy of Ainsworth's Latin-English dictionary from 1878 that was falling apart already and shedding bits of cover and spine whenever I looked at it. . . .

I loved having a book for a floor. When I woke in the morning and sat up in bed I would begin the day by reading something next to my feet. As I sat in the kitchen and ate breakfast there would always be some words under the table that invited reading. Sometimes in the evening I would just sit in a chair and read my floor, periodically moving the chair about as I read my way from the sink to the refrigerator.

Why is it so often easier to appreciate things outside of their context? I'd never looked through Ainsworth's dictionary much when it was a book, and yet when I turned it into floor tiles it suddenly became an object of great fascination. The fact that I now spent so much more time looking at it mitigated somewhat the guilt I felt at cutting up a book. (source)

If I still owned my old Craftsman fixer-upper, I'd do this too - or paper the walls, perhaps! I'd love to idly gaze at the pages of an old book during those inevitable wasted minutes of the day (waiting for water to heat, brushing teeth, awaiting the end of the spin cycle, etc.)

Then Shea charmed me a second time - by giving me a word I've been missing, yet never thought existed. Over the past few weeks we've been having abrupt thunderstorms here in the DC area - downpours that leave that distinctive, metallic, ephemeral post-summer-rainstorm odor of wet rocks and pavement. I've always thought there should be a word for that smell, and it turns out there actually is one. I had no idea! It's petrichor:

My favorite word for rain is the one that comes to mind when we take advantage of a pluvial lull, and stop driving. When we get out of the car the smell of freshly fallen rain rising off the sidewalk and the word that describes this smell inextricably link themselves in my brain-petrichor-and I cannot tell if the word makes me like the smell or the smell makes me like the word or if it matters at all. (source)

Thank you for that word, Ammon. (I guess I have to read your book now.)