Tools of the trade

Throughout my career, the most important tools for the job have been my contacts book, phone book and dictionary. The phone book is long gone, and the dictionary and thesaurus were gathering dust on an overcrowded bookshelf.

For two decades in newspaper offices, both were well used on a daily basis to check spellings and meanings of words, and to find alternatives to improve copy.

The matching Collins tomes sat proudly on my desk wherever I went, always within an arm’s reach and were often borrowed by colleagues. When I moved from one office, a colleague asked if I would leave them behind and treat myself to the new editions for my new job as mine were well worn and starting to show their age. Nice try!

Today, whether it is to check spellings and meaning, or to learn how to change a tyre or check for symptoms of an illness, the answer is always the same: “Why don’t you Google it?”

I have always resisted the temptation and not because I am a technophobe. It is because of increased use of slang, and because it was just as quick to find a better answer on a page as it was online. Technology is only as good as the person that programmed it and you often get a “one-size-fits-all” answer or, depending on the programme, Americanisms, such as aluminum instead of aluminium.

But this week, with sadness and almost a sense of shame, those two great volumes are no longer part of my inventory. Since setting up my own business and working from home, space has been at a premium and the weighty volumes took up too much space on the shelves, which is where they spent the past 13 months as bookends. 

I am sorry to say that I, too, have gone down the “Google it” route, mostly out of convenience. It is less hassle to look up something on the web than reach for the shelf, grab the dictionary or thesaurus, try to catch whatever it was propping up, and then putting it all back again. Several times a day. But the trade-off for that convenience is having to make do, rather than find exactly what I want.

So after 23 years of dedicated service, they have made their way to the community bookshop, and will hopefully be of use to someone. I couldn’t face going to a charity shop and having them rejected because no one would use them as they’d just “Google it”.

While a huge weight has been lifted from the shelves of my office, it has been replaced by a sense of guilt. And, despite their years of service, it is not for sentimental reasons. I genuinely feel that one day I will not be able to find the best answer and know that the solution lies in those pages and it would be worth keeping them. 

It is not just about correct spelling. The meaning and interpretation of words is key to what I do and I know that the web will give me endless explanations of fifth-century origins of something, but not always the precise and concise offerings I would find in the Oxford Concise Dictionary.

My name’s Mike and I no longer own a dictionary. There, I said it.

I’d love to hear if you’ve got rid of anything – however big or small – that you now wish you’d kept.