Spark your creativity with the Sims. Sometimes you might feel like you're not creative

and you have to go in search of your creative spark again. Maybe this is catching up with

creative friends, experimenting with a new look or trying out a new recipe.

And thanks to The Sims, inspiration is just one game and one spark away.

Ready to spark something? Download the Sims 4 and play for free. Welcome to another mini-cast from Away with Words. I'm Martha Barnett. Years ago I covered a story for a sports magazine about Torrey Merton, a woman trying to row a 23-foot boat across the ocean. She set out from the

canary islands with four months provisions and little else. No motor, no sail, no support vessel traveling with her.

And after 81 days in 2,962 lonely miles at sea, she reached her goal, becoming the first woman ever to row a boat

across the Atlantic.

But for Murdon, the challenge of rowing an ocean was nothing compared to the struggle of trying to explain why she'd done it in the first place.

Why endure crushing boredom, blazing heat, chilling rain, blisters, and back aches day after day, all to row a little

boat from one continent to the next.

Recently I thought of Murdon while I was reading a book about of all things dictionaries. It's by Am and

Shay and it's called Reading the OED, one man, one year, 21,730 pages.

Well, you see where I'm going with this.

When it comes to dictionaries,

Shay is an extreme adventurer.

And this book chronicles his quirky quest to scale the Mount Everest of lexicography, the

great Oxford English Dictionary.

Shay is besotted with words, so much so that he quit his job as a furniture mover in New York and spent an entire year reading the OED.

He did so, he writes, in order to find out what words there are for things in the world that I had always thought unnamed.

And find them he did, words like Petriker, that's P-E-T-R-I-C-O-R, it means the pleasant smell of rain on the

ground, especially after a dry spell.

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