The most expensive dictionary yet!

It's been announced that the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is moving online, at the cost of the hundred-pound print versions being terminated, forever.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/30/oxford-english-dictionary_1_n_698588.html
Most interestingly, the price tag is set at around £250 a year per subscription. This means £2.5K per 10 years, which can be compared with the £1K print version and £150 PC/Mac CD version. How can that not leave you thinking?

First, I want to say something about print versus online or CD-based dictionaries. I always have a hypothesis, derived from personal experience, that people remember words better when using the printed dictionary than when doing online or software-based look-ups. One of the reason, I cannot say for certain as it would require a degree in cognitive science, might be that the word being looked up in the printed dictionary is stored in your memory together with the spatial information of the page that the word is in, with the way the word and its explanations are printed, and with the words near it. The main idea here is that: there is more contextual information stored in your memory, in comparison to the online/software-based look-ups. The more contextual, high-level information there is, the more efficiently it is stored and retrieved by your memory.

Second, as a non-native English speaker (didn't even start learning English properly until I was 18), I've had a high level of exposure to numerous kinds of English dictionaries, both English-Vietnamese and English-English ones. The tiny paper-back ones; the large, hard-back one, the e-Dictionary ones, and the PC/Mac-friendly ones. Here is a priority list of things that a typical non-native English speaker uses the dictionary for:

• To look up the (most common) meanings of the words. The simpler the explanation and the more examples there are, the better.

• To look up phrases, idioms whose meanings are complete different to the ones constructed by threading the meanings of the individual words together.

• To look up the synonyms, antonyms
• For nouns, to find out if they are countable or uncountable
  
• To check the pronunciations
  

My understanding of the extra feature that OED offers, besides the inclusiveness, completeness of all the English words ever used, is:

• To find out the origin of the words, how it is used in different (literature) contexts.

In other words, (1)-(5) answer the what questions about the word, while (6) addresses the why question. How many of us, who aren't linguists or writers, are concerned with the latter? Not many. In science, we use English as a way to communicate, i.e. we only need each others to agree upon the meanings, not to know why they are these ways. Having said that, we all need people who can master and manipulate the meanings of words. We need poetry. We need arts. And those people need things like the OED.

So, is the price tag justified? The publisher can argue that the subscription buys the users the benefit of the fast, convenient, access-it-everywhere look-ups. Furthermore, the users always have the most up-to-date versions. And thousands of trees, both for making paper and book selves, will be saved. My opinion on this is: yes, go and buy it, but only if you can (1) afford it or (2) are a writer/poet/journalist/linguist. For others, I would recommend two options that adequately satisfy the requirement (1)-(5):

1. Cambridge advanced learner's dictionary, printed version or the CD version for PC and Mac.
   
2. McMillan free online dictionary: http://www.macmillandictionary.com/
   

Have a great day!

Reading and the Internet

An interesting article discusses a new book called “The Shallows”, whose thesis is that the Internet has altered our brain, in a bad way.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/aug/20/internet-altering-your-mind?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

The author, Nicholas Carr has previously written an article on Atlantics accusing Google (and the Internet bandwagon) of making it stupid. The main argument that occurs again in the book is that reading in the Internet induces multitasking - which is not necessarily a good thing - and content skimming.

With regards to the latter, it can be seen that Carr is a strong advocate for the idea of “slow reading”, i.e. reading books, the old ways. Slow reading, I agree, brings out the contemplative, reflective thinking of the readers. It roughly says that by immersing oneself, spending days of reading one book, the chance is high that one would stop and a moment to think, to relate and find connections with real life, or just simply appreciate the writing, the plot, the art being delivered by the text. A premise of slow reading is total concentration, total immersion with the book. One could imagine the act of slow reading is a continuous line of thought over a period of time. This is a stark contrast to the typical way people do Internet reading over the same period of time, which could be describe as ad-hoc, discontinuous, segmented lines of thought.

How do we read in the Internet? We mostly do our reading on the web. Beside it being unnatural for the eyes, we would never *just* read. We multitask, we listen to music, we check out pop up links, we check emails, facebook, twitter, ... and the list keeps going longer. Sadly, reading has become merely one of those task, and I feel chills down on my spine when thinking about the possibility that reading becoming a secondary task, i.e. we just happen to read while doing something else.

I am not jumping to the conclusion that the age of Internet reading is bad for the future generations, or even for us. First, it is currently impossible for science to quantify what are good and what are bad for our children. Second, the debates on the effect of the information age on our culture are still going strongly, with people from both camps refuse to come to a consensus. In the art camps, authors like Carr start using scientific evidence demonstrating the change in our brain structure as we get exposed to the Internet. Such the result is interesting, but merely for scientific interest, and scientists cannot say if the changes are bad or good. The wise men used to say that science only provides evidence and facts, not opinions. In the science camps, cognitive or neural scientists
usually claim the long-term benefit of online, role-playing games to children. In the contrary to the common thinking that video games are bad for children, those role-playing games enforce children to learn and practice good social behavior, improve their communication skills, and allow them to explore the possibilities that their parents’ generation did not have. As scientists are still struggling to quantify the effects of technologies on the youth, there certainly are strong evidence supporting the thesis that growing up with technology is a good thing for children.

Finally, my personal take on this is not to blame the technology, which by its nature has bad sides and good sides. It’s up to us to decide how to make the best of them. As a result, parents, teachers and politicians play important roles in shaping our future. As for reading, I consider myself lucky for being born before the Internet, to be able to observe and get the best of both worlds. I use the Internet to skim around ideas and topics I don’t know about. I use the Internet to find scientific articles at the speed unimaginable just more than one decade ago. However, text books, article print-outs and non-fictions are still the main resource for studying. I’m still building up my collection of novels, still indulging myself in the minds of the novelist, in the imaginary worlds full of fantastic charaters, in the emotions brought by the books - those that are unreachable by technology.