Hi Jeannine, I leave for Hollins on the 20th. Always a hectic week before, packing and cooking and cleaning.

You can find me standing in the magazine section of B&N waiting for them to shelve Orion–it’s my favorite magazine. Also The Oxford American, which is a gritty Southern literary magazine. I remember reading Redbook and Good Housekeeping all those years–I guess I’m as good a housekeeper as I’ll ever be so I might as well read nourishing publications.

You are so sweet to buy Artful Blogging–they are also including me in the fall issue. I’m not sure what, something about a blog post I did. Now I’m aiming for Orion, if only I could write like Anthony Doerr.

I also love this post, and thankful for Emerson’s acorns and your stepfather’s oaks and you for carrying it all on. I think I have that issue of Orion under a pile somewhere — I need to get it out. Also the Artful Blogger — you packed so much into that article, which was thoroughly you, I need to read it again.

Patti, you live in two great places. Florida “crackers” have wonderful idioms and syntax. And Maine–well, all those fishermen and that colorful lifestyle comes with its own language.

Yes! You should write the OED, Jama, and tell them!

One would think there wouldn’t be a page limit for dictionaries these days because of electronic formats. Kids could access “complete” dictionaries on their computers or iPads. No heavy lifting required!

Yes! You can make up those words–it’s called neologisms! MacFarlane mentioned at the end of his article that people, particularly children, make up words to describe things just as you’ve described.

I’m all for keeping language alive, through wonder-words and colloquial expressions. I remember using the word “stribble” in one of my picture books to describe a messy-haired doll. That was my mother’s word and it was perfect for the story’s time and place. My editor made me take it out.

Being sick in the summer is worse. In the winter you can be all cozy and indoors. In the summer you lay there and listen to people outside having a good time and think about the weeds taking over the roses.

I’m wondering if MacFarlane’s article (not just in Orion, but a lengthier piece in the U.K.’s Guardian) might shame the OED people into putting those words back.

Jama: I don’t understand it either. Make the dictionary longer! I suspect there is a page limit for the junior version–poor little kids, can’t carry around a big ol’ dictionary.

So we all had our Thorndike-Barnharts, as we called them! I wish I still had mine.

If you escaped this virus, you and Len were very lucky. Almost everyone I know had some version of it. I got it from Frank and thought it wouldn’t be as bad but I was in bed for *days*. Atticus stayed with me the whole time. Cats, as you know, love sick people, if they aren’t too sick.