The Story of the Dictionary (and my discovery of it)

The English Dictionary is the second most purchased and most used book behind the Bible only.  Of course, there isn't just one dictionary or version of it, just like there are multiple versions of the Bible.  Nevertheless, it is a popular book.  But as one renown dictionary maker (also known as a lexicographer) said, it is meant to be browsed in, not read cover to cover. 

There are several parts of language, and one of them is the actual words that are used, the vocabulary or the lexicon of a language.  This is what a dictionary is meant to help with at its fundamental level: allow people to understand the lexicon of the language.  That is why the first dictionaries were what we would call translation dictionaries and have two different languages in them, usually comparing Latin to some other language.  Later the idea developed to define the vocabulary of one language, creating monolingual dictionaries.  Then the development of ordering a dictionary in alphabetical order was introduced by Englishman Robert Cawdery, which became such an intrinsic part of dictionaries that books that don't do anything similar to a dictionary (define the lexicon) have acquired the title because of the alphabetical listing of their entries.  Then, finally there was the idea of an American dictionary, because our version of English was different from the British, and that's how Merriam-Webster became a household name. 

But really, you don't want to hear the story of the dictionary.  You would much rather hear about my story in the library finding out about dictionaries.  I dislike the fact that we have to put our annotated bibliography in alphabetical order, because that doesn't fit the order of the story, so I have numbered them in chronological order if you want a continuous story of discovery. 

Annotated Bibliography: Censorship in Elizabethan England

            For my annotated bibliography assignment, I decided to learn a little bit about censorship in Elizabethan England. Censorship is a topic that I’m very interested in, but it’s such a huge topic that I wouldn’t have known where to start if I was just researching anything to do with it, so I wanted to narrow it down somehow. The Tudors made for some of my favorite English royal drama, Elizabeth I is one of my favorite people, and Shakespeare was producing his work during the Elizabethan and Jacobean (Stuart) Eras, so I decided to learn everything I could about censorship in the Elizabethan Era. There weren’t very many books on that specific topic, but I was able to find several books in the library in which the issue was at least addressed on some level, and I used interlibrary loan to have a few other books sent over.

Print and its Effects on Medical Advances

(So according to some suggestions by our professor I'm adding this note.  This post is part of my ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY assignment.  The bibliography is below the page break and is about THE EFFECTS OF PRINT ON MEDICAL KNOWLEDGE.)

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Venturing into the strange world physical research in a library with actual books, moving bookshelves, and code-like numbers on the sides of these books can be a pretty scary task for today's college student.  I probably do about one or two research assignments in the library each semester, but I swear that each time a have I have to again overcome my fear of doing research and actual physical movement at once.  I also have to relearn how to look stuff up there every time I try to use the numbering system, which reminds me of the library card song from Arthur - An integral part of my childhood.  Please enjoy:

"Who's Dewey?": one of those questions we will never know the answer to. . . or maybe we could look him up on wikipedia.  Anyway, after getting reacquainted with the cataloguing system again, (which is actually not the Dewey Decimal System in the HBLL) I started to search for books that teach about how the printing press affected medicine.  So here it is: