Yes. For the first time ever, in my world that's filled with internet browsers and widgets and desktop and mobile apps, there is a paperback dictionary: "The Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus." I don't know why I bought it, though. I've always been good with words, whether it was a word I knew and so how to use it, too, or a word I'd never seen used before but could figure its meaning out by analyzing its root(s). On that note, buying a dictionary is almost an attempt to relive my growing years in Chennai and then Tumkur (in Karnataka).
Having never used a paper-bound dictionary in the last decade or so, I'm in no position to say that it wouldn't have been a mechanical process for me - the locating of words and then carefully reading the minute print - but something tells me I'd have seen it as something emotional. There are no specific memories associated with it, as such, and the only dictionary I've ever owned is even now gathering dust in the attic of an aunt's ancestral house. I wouldn't mind if it was lost someday while shifting locations, but I'm sure I'd become furious if one page of it was so much as folded. Now, there's another one. A new sibling of sorts.
I don't know what else to say. It's like that sensation when you thought you saw something out of the corner of your eyes but can't see head-on. It's that name that's at the tip of your tongue but won't come out just when the time's right. It's that feeling you get when you thought you just missed something that could've been important or life-changing in some way. The thing is, I don't know what I've missed. The last time I bought a dictionary, I began the journey to be the man I am today, and I love the man I've become. I know I could be aggrandizing the occasion needlessly, and if you think I am, then let me say this: I bought a dictionary. We'll see.
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