I have a two-volume, leather-bound dictionary from the 1980s. It’s a Funk & Wagnalls, complete with supplementary sections, including glossy, colored world maps and a list of the Presidents and First Ladies – Ronald and Nancy Reagan were the last entries. I’m pretty sure my family bought them from a door-to-door salesman. 
Weird to think that people actually used to buy things that way.
They are substantial volumes, so much so that I often wondered why I continued to pull them from the shelf many years later, even as an electronic dictionary often sat nearby. But as much as I like technology (the electronic dictionary really was cool at first), the heft of the volumes seemed to signify more than just their weight and would always draw me back.
Twenty years later, that dictionary was the one I used when first teaching my children how to look up a word. And the dictionary that got opened whenever someone asked, “what does that mean?” It was after one such query that we discovered a section that we had never noticed. Sitting on the couch, flipping through the supplemental sections of the dictionary (yeah we’re nerds), my daughter and I came across a compilation of words grouped by the year they first appeared in the dictionary. The list started in the early 1900s, shortly after the first Funk and Wagnalls Dictionary was published in 1895. Reading the neologisms, year by year, felt like a quick tour through history and culture. Many of the words were familiar and still in use, but many seemed stuck in the time that they were created, their relevance short lived. History, for me, always had been about dates and places. It wasn’t until reading that list, however, that I fully understood our accounts of history were as much about the language used to explain an event, as the event itself.
poliRhetoric 