I wasn’t planning to do a separate Christmas post this year — I got a bunch of movies in foreign languages (Three Times by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Fantômas and Les Vampires by Louis Feuillade, Lost Illusions by Xavier Giannoli, etc.), but that didn’t seem to justify a post. But then Songdog and family came over, and they got me something I’ve been drooling over and that is eminently Hattic: Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 12th Edition. I used Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate for my entire working life, and every time a new edition came out the bosses would provide us proofreaders and editors with a copy each, and I would spend some time comparing it with the old one, checking the additions and omissions. I think I must have had the Seventh New Collegiate, which was around when I was in college, but I’ve definitely got the 8th (which I used at my first proofreading job) and every one since. I thought there would never be a 12th, since everyone kept saying the print dictionary was dead, but lo and behold, they put it out, and now I’ve got one. An impressively expanded etymology is that for abide; the 11th had simply
[ME, fr. OE ābīdan, fr. ā-, perfective prefix + bīdan to bide; akin to OHD ir-, perfective prefix — more at bide]
Look what it is now:
{ME abiden, going back to OE abīdan, from a-, perfective prefix + bīdan “to bide, wait”; a- (also ā-, ǣ- under stress in nominal derivatives) akin to OFris a-, perfective prefix, OS ā-, ō- (unstressed a-) and probably to OE or- “outward, extreme, lacking (in nominal compounds),” OFris & OS ur-, or-, OHG ar-, ir-, er- unstressed inchoative verb prefix, ur “out of, away from,” ON ūr-, ör-, “out of, from,” ør-, privative prefix, Gothic us- “out of,” us-, privative and perfective prefix; if from pre-Gmc *ud-s- akin to OE ūt “out” — more at out entry 1, bide}
(For some reason they’ve started using curly brackets with etymologies.) You’d think you’d wandered into the OED!
And Slavo/bulbul gave me Echopraxia by Peter Watts, the sequel to Blindsight, which I devoured over a decade ago and have not ceased thinking about since; I can’t wait to dig in.
You’ll love Echopraxia. Peter is a chill guy, we were supposed to meet, but he got Covid. I don’t remember when I read Blindsight, but probably more than fifteen years ago.