[Susan McLean]

I freely admit to using dictionaries, both rhyming and regular, thesauri, and anything else that will help me. Knowing what all the options are doesn't reduce the role of judgment in choosing exactly the right word for the context. I'm currently engaged in translating the poetry of Catullus from Latin into English metrical verse, which is fiendishly hard because I am trying to be accurate and rhyme and keep the meter regular. When I am writing my own poetry, I have a bit more leeway. But frankly, I love words, and I think most poets do too. I read dictionaries the way cooks read cookbooks. So many words, so little time.

[Robert J. Clawson]

[quote]Originally posted by Susan McLean:
[b]

"Knowing what all the options are doesn't reduce the role of judgment in choosing exactly the right word for the context."

I'll buy this.

Bob

[Richard Wakefield]

Someone who's a lot more wired than I am will be able to say how much of this is currently possible, but it seems to me that with the OED available on disc one should be able to generate rhymes ad hoc, allowing of course for the vagaries of English spelling (the machine won't know, for example, that "love" and "move" no longer rhyme). It ought to be possible to do searches for rhymes on any number of syllables, or to find rhymes with only Polish roots, or rhyming words that entered the language between 1350 and 1500, or whatever. It might require extra software, and the person who writes it stands to make, oh, tens of dollars from eager formalist poets. It would sure be fun to explore.
My favorite etymological dictionary is Joseph Shipley's "The Origins of English Words." It's a tad awkward to use at first, but Shipley published the thing when he was in his nineties, culminating a lifetime of philology, and every entry has fascinating, surprising digressions revealing unsuspected relationships between seemingly disparate words. "Awkward," for example, turns out to be from the Anglo-Saxon for left-handed and therefore yet another slur (along with "sinister" and "gauch") on us southpaws.
RPW

[Ernest Slyman]

You wrote "tens of dollars from eager formalist poets." A good profit. Certainly better than a penny for your thoughts. From this I conclude that poets are coming up in the world. A fortune is out there waiting to be made. Well, a few bucks anyway.

On another subject, friends and I got together recently and purchased the OED on CD. It took us all of two weeks to determine how to copy it.

Since then it's been like the old testament story of the loaves and fishes. Of course, we had to determine first on what merit basis friends should receive their copy. Was it mere friendship? Should they give blood. Or did they have to perform some function? Paint our house, say, or whatever duty.

Money was not what we wanted. We were a strange lot.

Turned out many CDs were sent out with no rigid demands. Why, because pirates are really nice folks, you know. They're beast to copyright laws.

(I mention the OED CD because the CD version allows you to search and save whatever entry. The OED has hitherto been limited to folks pouring over the many volumes, often hoping to run into the right stuff.)

Same thing went for the much coveted JD Salinger's Uncollected Short Stories. A file no bigger than a quarter megabyte, and now has made the rounds by email to every eager-beaver reader.

The pirates never died. They just went on the net.

Anyone looking for the Salinger file can find it on the newsgroups or sharebear.com or whatever filesharing application.

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[Robert J. Clawson]

Not that I love the character, but I love the way Noah Cross (Chinatown) would say it:

Oh, Lord, rimes from your head are fine, but if you can't tickle them out, use a goddamned dictionary, Mr. Gittes.