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Home Office Computing, April, 1996 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

An Electronic Dictionary Fuels a Well-Known Writer's Love of Language

EVER SINCE COMPUTERS entered--and in some respects came to dominate--my life, I have from time to time, quite accidentally, tripped upon a program that caused a glint in the eye of the possessor. I also found that he or she wasn't always all that eager to communicate the discovery. It can be that way with a special joke: Some people just don't want to toss it around indiscriminately, perhaps on the grounds that a universal knowledge of it would cause it to lose its flavor.

It was through such experiences, plus the comprehensive generosity of one or two experts, that I came upon programs that had the effect on me I'd have expected if I were in 16th-century Peru and someone had suddenly said: "Here, why don't you try this when you move all those rocks around? It's called a wheel."

About two years ago someone casually mentioned the American Heritage Dictionary. Years before I had bought the Oxford English Dictionary on one CD and paid an appalling 900 bucks for it. But it isn't that often that you build up the etymological hunger that absolutely requires you to know when, under the scrutiny of lexicographers, was the first use of bacterial (1872). And to check it out meant a considerable interruption in your work, or at least in my work, because I can't simultaneously view my screen and my CD. What happened is that I neglected the OED, and indeed sometimes went to the volumes, rather than bother with the CD version.

Along came this retiring soul who said to me that, really, I should get the AHD. What he was talking about, he said, was 15 floppy disks that you could enter as a subdirectory in your hard drive and instruct your working program to stand by to access it. What then happens, he said, is that you can with one (or two) keystrokes, stare at the dictionary meaning of the word you have just finished typing.

"How long does that take?" I wanted to know.

"How fast is your computer?"

"I have a 486."

"It will take about a tenth of a second."

I got the AHD but, even as I installed it, I found myself wondering whether it would be a kid's version of a dictionary, of no particular use to those who have passed the John-Jane-Gyp vocabulary phase.

You will have guessed it is nothing of the sort. There are 361,000 entries in this magical device. If you choose, you can call in the thesaurus. You spelled it thesorus? A column of 15 words on the right gives you the nearest thing to what you were looking for. The AHD is also a mini-encyclopedia. When was Xerxes? 519-465 B.C.

I was so struck by the AHD's effective displacement in my life of the major dictionaries (OED, Webster III), I began to record the words I asked the meaning of which it did not have. Here is the fruit of two years' labor: seakindly, apopemptic, outrance, angelism, jesuitry, roadkill, ipsedixitism, potvaliant, and instantiate. Two years' search!

My opinion for years has been that the nonusers of word processing simply have to be abandoned. There isn't really any point, after the third or fourth try, in saying to Alistair Cooke, "Look, old boy, you really must do away with that typewriter." But then I think of my AHD. It changes your habits by enticing you to look up quite ordinary words, to reflect on their etymologies, or usages, or whatever. I mean, I don't have idle hours to spare, but I can give you a tenth of a second any time--just try me. And don't think you can dismiss me as flushed with bridal-night enthusiasm. I remind you, it was a full two years ago I found this, the greatest clerical blessing of my lifetime, excepting only Word Processing, the King of Kings.

The other day, I was in a radio exchange with the senior U.S. liberal, Professor Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who in a casual survey of technology stunned me by saying that, in his judgment, "word processing is the greatest invention in modern history." Suddenly I was face-to-face with the flip side of Paradise. That means, doesn't it, that Professor Schlesinger will write more than he would do otherwise?

WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR. is editor at large of National Review. His latest book is a novel called Brothers No More (Doubleday).