When I was in fourth grade, a boy named Tommy Cunningham outed me to the class as someone who occasionally flipped through our classroom dictionary for fun.

It's all good. We're Facebook friends now. And while the nickname he

saddled me with was not intended as a compliment at the time, I've come to realize that probably

every fourth grade classroom has its own dictionary brain. And to meet any of them in adulthood

is to meet a kindred spirit. From KERA in Dallas, this is Think.

I'm Chris Boyd.

Journalist Stefan Fatsis became a dictionary brain

around the same age when for his 11th birthday,

he received happily a big fat copy of Webster's New World Dictionary

of the American Language.

It has served as a tool and inspiration for him ever since, and a kind

of muse for his latest reporting project, which claimed years of his working life, but resulted

in a new book of his own titled Unabridged, The Thrill of and Threat to the Modern Dictionary.

Stefan, welcome back to think. Thank you for having me, Chris. Great to be here.

You still have that dictionary more than 50 birthdays later.

I have to, there it is, I have to imagine that you have moved multiple times, you have changed offices.

What do you love about it?

Well, I love mostly that it's an artifact of my life, of my childhood, and something that really

did help shape who I would become. My mom gave it to me, my 11th birthday, I won't say the

year, oh, it's in the book, 1974, and I used it in high school, and I used it in college, and I used it when I began my life as a reporter.

But before all of that, I just loved having this physical object.

It had these amazing colored drawings, these wonderful pages with pictures of buildings and people.

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