What's up, it's Major. Today's episode is guest-hosted by the poet Jason Schneiderman,

Hangtite, and I'll be back on June 12th.

I'm Jason Schneiderman, and this is the slowdown.

I love dictionaries. I love words, obviously, and how could I love words and not love dictionaries?

Dictionaries hold all the words that ever were, while telling you all the things a word has

ever meant, and sometimes they even tell you how a word came to mean what it means.

I'm not always so aware that my relationship to dictionaries is more, let's say,

passionate than other people's relationship to dictionaries until something happens that reveals

it to me. For example, a relative once asked me about whether the word ironic could mean something bad

or annoying. I replied that I had actually just looked up the word irony,

and that the usage panel had split over whether or not the word ironic could be used to describe

human foibles or failings. So I explained, while the usage panel unanimously agreed that

rain on your wedding day is not ironic, half of them felt that the firehouse burning down

could accurately be described as ironic. My cousin's response was not what I expected.

Usage panel? He said, what's a usage panel? I explained that some dictionaries assemble

well-regarded writers to weigh in on controversial uses of language. Then I was about to start

recounting an amusing anecdote from the introduction to the dictionary where all of this had been

explained, but I stopped myself thinking that maybe I should not mention that I had been

reading the introduction to the dictionary. Today's poem uses the form of a dictionary definition

the way other poems use the form of the sonnet or villainel. Instead of starting with a highly

technical and specific word like irony or cardiovascular, Phyllis Levin starts with a seemingly

simple word part, a common word that it turns out can mean many things.

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