An End to a Series
First off, I think it's appropriate to notify my readers that I'm discontinuing the dictionary series as of today. I can't go on posting words that are of little or no interest to me or to anyone else. The recent spate of words that are, usually, in the noun form have little to offer me to riff on for any substantial amount of space. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I feel like after having seen several terrible words, that it's time to move on and pursue something with more relevance.

What can explain the noticeable lack of interesting words? Today, for example, I have "inadvertency," in one of those terribly short definitions that tells you next to nothing about the word other than being used short example with "..." to indicate where the word would appear in the example. Which leads me to wonder who is looking up these words. Now, I realize that it's entirely possible. and most likely, that these words at the top of the page are not the words being looked at by the users. Having said that, I think a worthy enterprise might be to pursue, at random, the word on the two pages that might have been the object of inquiry. My theory would be that, for the most part, people use dictionaries to look up words that are common but are hard to spell correctly or are common but have meanings that are hard to discern from the context being used. Using this as a backdrop, let's look at the two pages where "inadvertency" appears and try to surmise which word was the actual "word" that needed clarification for one of if not both the above reasons. Among the words appearing on these two pages are the following: inalienable, inaugurate, inbreeding, incarceration, incest, and inch. Knowing that this dictionary is in a law library could lead you to conclude that words such as "inalienable" or "incarceration" could possibly be of interest to a law student. However, it's also a possibility that someone is interested in the dynamics of "inbreeding" and "incest," which kinda go hand in hand, and are, most likely, crimes that could be prosecuted by perspective lawyers. My bet, though, is that the person using these two pages was looking for a definition or a spelling of the former and not the latter.

As interesting as the preceding was, I don't think that this is a worthy pursuit of my time and space on this site. Alas, I don't expect that many people are going to miss my series; I know I won't. So, now what can I write about? What type of series should I pursue? I'm asking you, my two readers, to tell me what I can use here in the library that will allow me to make a continuing series? My suggestion, based on the quote below is to use the copy of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations to find a different quote each night. How's that sound?