Slowing Down

It's Friday.  It's the last "freaky friday" trip of the summer for my kids, who will be going to a water park called Sholem in Champaign today.  They went there last summer and said this is a good one.  They are now connoisseurs of Illinois Water Parks.  Yes, yes they are indeed.

Now while typing that last paragraph, I had to stop and look up the word connoisseur in the dictionary.  My big red old hardback American Heritage Dictionary.  The same one mentioned way back in my early days of blogdom when I discovered to my great horror that the word HUMMUS was not in that dictionary.  Gasp!

I was reminded while looking up the word connoisseur of the joys of stopping to look a word up in the dictionary.  Yes, I can use spell check, but the joy of opening that book and browsing and then finding the word you are looking for and getting a bunch of related information about the word, such as, for example, connoisseur is from French and Latin...and then I remembered the Spanish word Conocer which means to know personally (like you would know a person but not how you would know information ... that word is Saber).  Well, call me a Word Nerd but I love that stuff!

Then there is the joy of having another entry catch your eye and attention.  My big old red AHD has photos and drawings in the sidebars.  And today what caught my eye was a photo of Joseph Conrad.  Yes, the guy who wrote, among other things,  Heart of Darkness.  Scary story!

Well, while looking for the word connoisseur and finding a photo of old Joe, I discovered that Joseph Conrad is not English, as I'd thought, but born in Poland as Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski.  He was born in 1857, 100 years before me! 

See, if I hadn't chosen to look that word up in the dictionary I'd never have known that.  And I bet you that info will come in handy someday.  Maybe while doing something important, really important, like a crossword puzzle with my dad!