They call them random questions for a reason, I suppose.
One night, while checking the spelling of a word, we started actually seeing the illustrations speckled throughout our paperback dictionary. Where before they had fallen into the visual noise, small drawings of castanets, bongos, peanut plants and the diamondback rattlesnake seemed to leap from the pages. We were happy to have stumbled on to our favorite of all the dictionary illustrations - The Ascot - for a variety of reasons.
And seeing the gleam in the ascotted man's eye made us question - How does a dictionary choose the definitions that should include illustrations? The number of instruments illustrated suggests that there's a method; though the variety throughout the book made us think it was completely random. Perhaps certain words require more than other words to give them meaning.
Could/would you illustrate a verb?
These are the questions that, in their own small way, keep us up at night.
No comments:
Post a Comment