Are your words up to date?

My son and I recently studied about Noah Webster in History. He was very interested to learn that while Noah Webster was growing up most schools only had three books for all of the grades! I looked at the stack of books we use for school. We certainly have more than three. Between teachers edition's, test books, workbooks and others we have closer to twenty. I was shocked to find out that it took Mr. Webster that many years, twenty, to write the first American Dictionary!

My son and I took a little tour of our dictionary. The copyright date on our is 1986, exactly twenty years old. He thought it was funny that words such as ATM, internet, and web were not listed. Okay web was, but not in form in which most of think today. It made me think that we need to update our dictionary. I know the internet is readily available, but I believe there is something cool about looking up words in the text itself.

Today we looked up the word repair. It was in a quote he was writing from George Washington. In old use repair also meant "to go". It helped the quote make so much more sense. Repair also comes before replace in the dictionary. You can even find wisdom in the dictionary, it is always a good idea to try and repair something before you just replace it.

So Mr. Webster spent twenty years writing a book that currently becomes dated in way less time than that. Perhaps we should all look up diligence, persistence, and patience. As far as I know those words are still in the dictionary.