She adores the dictionary so much, she wraps her legs around it. She tries to give birth to it. “My son, the dictionary,” she wants to say. This is why she’s childless. She expects too much. A dictionary! What baby would fall into the midwife’s hands spewing all those words? Let alone the phonetics, the derivations, the parts of speech. Is it the entries’ unbudgeable order she’s smitten with? Tuba will never appear before sassafras, muck before lugworm, and every one of them, from the double-volumed Oxford that suicidal lexicographers rope around their waists before they walk into the ocean to the concise a new immigrant carries in her purse, begins, as you’d expect, with A. This predictability could be a bore, but what makes up for it, she insists, is the volume’s generosity, its cold-blooded genius. A’s opening definition, “The first letter of the alphabet,” is followed by a minimum (depending on the edition) of five entries, including “the sixth note of the diatonic scale of C major”—you need a dictionary, unless you’re Gould, to know that. (You write down “diatonic” to look up later.) What comes next are AA and AAA and some famous people’s names, building up suspense for the arrival of the first common noun, which—cue the drums—is aardvark. Yes! It’s an animal—that’s not news to you—but what kind? “A nocturnal, insectivorous, badger-sized mammal having large ears, a long snout, and a long tongue, native to sub-Saharan Africa.” And now, along with aardvark, you’ve got insectivorous to mate with your mouth and tongue. Dictionaries make you younger, she’ll tell you. You become a kid again who’s falling for the names of dinosaurs. But the best is yet to come. If the beginning knocks you out, wait till you reach the end. In the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, second edition, the final entry, she says, is zzz, the sound of snoring. How great is that? How much more human, how much more Shakespearean (“our little life is rounded” and all that) can it get?