Dictionaries! The Word Nerd recently received two excellent dictionaries for a birthday gift. The first one is an etymoloigcal dictionary (one that gives the origin and/or history of a word or phrase) and a pirate dictionary. The Word Nerd didn’t even know pirate dictionaries existed so is doubly excited by this thoughtful gift. Here is an entry from How to Speak Pirate by Geordie Telfer.
Dolly Shop: a shop ostensibly selling marine supplies, but in reality, a clearinghouse for stolen goods.
Advertisement
I once received a bad spellers dictionary. It contains common misspellings of words, and the correct spelling for that word. My teachers always told me that if I did not know how to spell a word, I should look it up in the dictionary, but how do you look up a word that you cannot spell?