I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

At a reading recently, a fiction writer friend publicly making the distinction between herself

and me stated, for novelists like myself, words are tools, but for Major and his ilk,

words are jewels.

That's facts.

The litmus test to any writer's word is how much they cherish language and how that

love is told or jeweled in the very fabric of a phrase.

And where do we satiate this craving beyond our own deep reading?

The dictionary, of course, is one thing to hear writers discuss their preferred writing

utensils, their design and function, refillable cartridges, fountain pen tips, pointed nibs,

favorite castell or Montblanc.

But it's a whole other tent revival to hear writers gush over their favorite dictionaries.

I know a novelist who swears by his grand old Webster's second edition, published in 1828.

Then, there is the mystery writer who keeps her illustrated Oxford on a mahogany stand

by the front door and uses it as a divination tool at dinner parties for just before a date.

With its 600,000 words, the Oxford English Dictionary never fails to turn a mere search

forward into a descent down a luxuriant hole of splendid etymologies and illustrations.

For example, Major from the Latin Magnus, meaning great.

In graduate school, my friend Sonia was the first human being I knew to own a 20-volume

Oxford English Dictionary outside of a library.

Thick tomes with blue binding and large, aggressive lettering on the cover.

Sonia was ceremonious when retrieving its posh slip case magnifying glass.

...