I am perched in the Rare Books room with a three volume set of the 1728 Chambers Cyclopaedia. As I work my way across the A section, my mind dredges up a 20-year old memory.

I spent a fair amount of time in detention during my last years of high school, mostly for tardiness. Our punishment was to show up at school an hour early and copy by hand out of the dictionary until classes started. (Being tardy to detention earned another detention, so you can imagine how that worked out for me.)

At first it was indeed punishment for me, but then I started to look at the language and actually read what I was copying, and then I started to be more selective and copy only the words that I was interested in, and then I started using the word selection to construct elaborate, oblique fuck yous to anyone who might bother to read the pages. I don’t anyone ever did read them. I mean, would you bother to skim a bunch of dictionary copying created by the mildest delinquents in the world?

It only now occurs to me that what I got out of those hours of punishment was an abiding love of reference texts. I suppose this is only one of many ways that The Little Southern Baptist School’s efforts had unanticipated results where I was concerned.