When I was a kid my Dad was my dictionary. A career newspaper reporter and editor who could bang out 100 words per minute on his Olympia manual typewriter, my Dad loved words the way I loved music. He could define, spell, and demonstrate the use of any word that ever popped into my young imagination.
I’m not like my Dad. In fact, I have to use a dictionary nearly every day. Usually it’s to look up a definition rather than a spelling. Since the 1990s when I worked in a newspaper myself, I have relied on online dictionaries. However lately I’ve gravitated toward physical books instead.
When you search an online dictionary you are telegraphing your existence to the universe. Even as you load the dictionary’s main search page on your browser or phone, the data collecting machinery behind the website springs to life, recording your IP address and attempting to cross reference it with everything it already knows about you.
At minimum, a website may record your computer’s unique identification code and your IP (Internet Protocol) address. Many websites also place small text files on your device called cookies. Cookies also can be read by websites, unearthing data stored in previous web site visits.
The point is not that data is collected. It is that your simple act of looking up a word creates a ripple in the internet. It is both a transaction and an interaction involving other people and the machines they made. It is not necessarily wrong, or even dangerous. But it is a commotion. At that moment in time you are not alone. Some people know exactly what you are doing and approximately where you are. And they are recording.
Now picture yourself alone at your desk. It’s late at night and your house is dark except for the warm glow of a desk lamp. You open your dog-eared copy of Webster’s and thumb through a few pages to find that elusive definition. In this quiet moment you experience a solitude that is rare in the modern age of communication. Your defiant act of opening a dictionary goes unnoticed by man or beast, and only the light reflecting off the pages and beaming through your window into the hazy night sky causes any significant disturbance in the universe.
I have come to appreciate the purity and solitude of opening a book, and the nostalgia and privacy it offers. This is not to say that I avoid the internet entirely. I simply enjoy the moments when I’m able to choose not to broadcast my thoughts to those vigilant algorithms and databases. They don’t need to know that I’ve forgotten the meaning of “evanescent.”
My dictionary doesn’t judge me, and it doesn’t remember a thing.
