Some months back I believe I mentioned that I won a $50 gift certificate to my favorite bookstore. While on campus last Friday I finally had occasion to use it as the down payment on a hefty Italian-English (and vice versa) dictionary. For the battery of foreign language translation exams we have to take to graduate, it pays to have a good dictionary. The first time I took the Latin exam, I made the mistake of bringing my little Cassell's paperback. It was completely useless, not only because it was small, but because its classical Latin bore little resemblance to the Italian church Latin I had to translate. As a result, I had to buy a heftier dictionary. A similar tome in German followed, joining the series of French dictionaries I already owned, and thus a dictionary fetish was born. I also own less impressive dictionaries in Russian and Irish. I studied French and Latin in school and lived in France for a while, but the rest of the languages I've taught myself, at least in part. I studied Russian in college for a couple of years, but I'd already taught myself the basis one summer in high school when I had nothing better to do.

I've been having a great deal of fun paging through the Italian dictionary. First of all, I find it very easy to understand Italian without its aid, thanks to my background in French and Latin. Second, the language just sounds so poetic. But this dictionary includes so many arcane words that send me running to an English dictionary in order to find out what the translation means, that I find myself dipping into it for pleasure reading.

Today's vocabulary list:

Arri -- giddy up. I'll have to try this out on the horses next door.
Assideramento -- frostbite. I like this because despite its alpine northern region, frostbite is something I do not associate at all with Italy.
Cleistogamo -- cleistogamic (self-fertilizing, as applied to plants). From the extended definition of this one I learned why I can't get a certain type of weed to vacate my lawn.
Chiassone -- a rowdy person. I'll be using this on AJ soon.
Dongiovannismo -- what it sounds like -- Don Juanism. But I'm very pleased to know it's a word.
Doposcuola -- a school club that organizes extracurricular activities. It sounds vaguely illicit, but probably isn't.
Indossatore -- either a male model or a valet -- an interesting association.
Pesapersone -- a bathroom scale (literally "weigh person"). I like the practicality of this one.

I've found myself running to the OED pretty regularly this week, thanks to a few journal articles on my agenda. Words that I've had to look up this week:

Imbricated (overlapped, like fish scales)
Coterminous (sharing a boundary)
Discursive (rambling or reasoned) -- this was one I thought I knew (as rational procedure from premise to conclusion) but the thing I was reading used the former meaning to describe a rambling argument, which meant the word was used to pretty much mean the opposite of the meaning I was used to, which confused me greatly.
AJ is finally back at school today, after having had a week off for Columbus Day, the purpose of which mystifies me. All three of us are breathing a sigh of relief at returning to our quotidian routine.

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