Death of a Culture

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"Have you noticed the news that Concise Oxford Dictionary will cease to exist in the print mode? No future print of COD! You use Webster. Yet, I would love to see your obituary (or epitaph) of COD on this momentous event"....

..................................................G. Ranga Rao IAS


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GRR belongs to my generation that roughly covers those who were born during the Second World War and had their schooling in Chacha Nehru's Free India of the early 1950s.

As I am fond of quoting repeatedly, Historian (Padma Bhushan) Ramachandra Guha, himself of a younger generation, said: "The 1950s were a special time, almost an innocent time, in the history of the nation".

We were unique: we saw and lived through the fastest-paced of Revolutions in Society, History and Technology.

'Innocence' came from an overflow of dubious values like selfless patriotism of the Freedom Struggle drilled at home and school (in Assembly and Lessons) and even cinemas (we never called them 'movies or films'), cricket, and Sankar's Cartoons; and a slow, easy-paced, tension-free childhood (without school uniforms, shoes, neckties, home work and bulky back-breaking bags against which RKN made his maiden speech in Parliament) with lots and lots of free time but no scope for entertainment other than playing outdoors and reading indoors.

School was from 10 AM to 4 PM (last period was Games). From any corner of our Village, school was within 10 minutes run; which meant 2 hours of play before school and 4 hours after. If I am still alive, kicking and full of joie de vivre at this ripe age, I owe it to my happy school life.

Jim Corbett says in Jungle Lore: "....the time I spent in the jungles (in my childhood) held unalloyed happiness for me....My happiness, I believe, resulted from the fact that all wild life is happy in its natural surroundings...." (he should know!)

We kids were the wild life of our Village and our school was our jungle (natural habitat).

Playing meant inexpensive improvised outdoor games like kabadi, gullidanda, golies and football made of rags rolled and tied into a warped sphere. Our generation never saw a fat school kid raised on junk food.

Reading meant (for the likes of GRR and me) reading English story books, and that meant a Dictionary in every home and in some pockets too.

I first saw COD in my father's tiny book rack. He was an English Buff apart from being an English Teacher. But I never opened it; whenever I wanted the meaning of a new word I would ask my father.

When I left school and joined University, I was living with my uncle in whose spacious book rack there was this COD once again. And I used to read it for pleasure.

When I shifted to IIT KGP, the first thing in its Central Library that fascinated me was the magnificent desktop 2-Volume Unabridged Webster (with silver-on-black thumb-notch-bookmarkers for serial alphabet). The jump from COD to Webster was literally my coming of age: more entries, more meanings, quotes from famous authors, synonyms and antonyms apart from etymology.

I myself own the shorter but adequate Collegiate Webster.

The CL also had the Mega-Volume OED (Oxford English Dictionary) which was encyclopedic and forbidding (it is perhaps meant for researchers in Eng Lit & Lang).

But COD was the Janapriya heart-throb. There were many competitors like Chambers, Cambridge, Random House; but COD had the stamp of pomp and authority.

Pratik's father, Professor Prasad Khastgir of BHU IT, a much loved Physics Teacher (like his son) and a 'super- strong' Bibliophile, had a huge collection of books and dictionaries which Pratik inherited (along with his love of books). Pratik tells me that the one regret of his father was that he couldn't buy the Multi-Volume OED!

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Fast forward half a century to the present:

I have a 3-year-ancient (six months qualifies as 'old' in mobile parlance) junk Nokia cell-phone. But it is GPRS & GPS-enabled. So I can check not only my e-mail and whereabouts, Google on it, and look up the meaning of any word in any of the many Free Online Dictionaries practically free of cost.

I do it when I am relaxing in bed.

When I am at my desk-top PC and composing, I use the online Webster which went commercial and very user-friendly a couple of days back.

Very very convenient.

But that is all about online dictionaries: 'convenient'.

But you can look up only one word at a time; not flip through lovingly as you can with a hard copy COD or Webster in your lap or on your belly (one memorable Saturday afternoon when I went to pick up the corrected manuscript of one of our joint papers to my guide SDM's Qrs at KGP, I found him lying supine on his bed with a fat dictionary on his fat belly; and he greeted me with: "the integral is converted 'into', and not 'to' which happens only with religions").

To put it mildly, the contrast is like between old-fashioned romantic love and new-fangled hep sex: the former is sustained, faithful, long-drawn and full of possibilities, while the other is vigorous 'have-fun-get-it-over' with a different online thing every other time for variety.

Human anatomy being what it is, no online version can kill a 'pocket book', which is so ergonomic. The whole of 'Autocrat' is available online; but it is a pain in the neck literally to read it on the monitor in a crouching posture. No way it can replace the beautifully bound hard copy which you can read anywhere and in any posture.

But few 'read' dictionaries.

They just 'look up'.

So, online Dictionaries will 'do'.

Thus the COD and Collegiate Webster fall between two stools: They are neither like pocket dictionaries nor like the much bigger 'resource' Library Editions of OED and Unabridged Webster.

So they won't sell.

And are doomed to go out of print (saving that many fig trees).

And reincarnate in their free online avatars with ads by half-covered tits to earn offsetting revenues (just click on: www.m-w.com, type-in 'titbit', go!, wait, wait!, look to the left, pray to God; and ENJOY!)

I just looked up 'tit' in my online Webster: "usually vulgar : breast —usually used in plural".

Serves my purpose to a titbit.

Sad, but inevitable.

Dictionaries, wiktionaries, online, offline, mobile, immobile or whatever, remain indispensable as long as languages are used.

They just keep changing their colors like so many chameleons.

Adieu to Hard COD & Collegiate Webster!

Welcome to their Soft and Supersoft Versions (like Forhans Tooth Brushes)!

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