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Nov 5, 2022Liked by Leanne Ogasawara

What a special essay! I'll start with Lost Words. I was dumbfounded about the choices. Willow? Acorn? Who are these people making these decisions? Why didn't they just add words? (The replacements you list are very cut and dry. Lacking any imaginative presence.) Anyway, McFarlane's book is very special; the illustrations glorious. Wide Garden of Words is fabulous. Reminds me of the Chinese proverb, "A book is a garden carried in the pocket." (Posted on my refrigerator.). Weaving a Ship will have me swooning all week . . . Lol!

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I love the last words book. I often give it as Christmas gifts. And I had no idea it was sent to Music thank you so much for sharing that with me! Looking forward to listening later today. I haven’t read easy life yet but I really want to I have the hard cover!

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The Lost Words book is very special and has beautiful illustrations by Jackie Morris. I saw it live set to music at Snape Maltings in the UK you can hear it here. https://open.spotify.com/album/1QKk5Ghdzdm5IttO3q98Zd?si=eLqV7kJZSCKpP9SR66bwWA I am just about to read The Easy Life in Kamusari by Shion Miura. Looking forward to reading The Great Passage.

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I have the 字統 PC-desktop application and used to use it for its lookup feature, but unfortunately it isn't Unicode-aware and hasn't been updated, so it's rather clunky to use these days.

Like you, I love dictionaries, and I used to have a wall full of them, including different editions of Kojien dating back to the third. There was a time when Kojien lost its luster and started to look tired, but then several competitors came out in the late 1980s that kind of shook its editors out of their complacency. Daijirin was the first of them, and as its online version is continuously updated, it still gives Kojien a run for its money. I'm not convinced that Kojien is still the most authoritative of its cohorts—personally, I think its glosses are too terse.

I was told looooong ago that 舟を編む is a vestige of times when people on these islands actually _did_ sort of weave small boats using vines to bind things together, and that the expression survived other techniques through—what else?—poetry.

Now to stick a garden of words into my pocket and go sit in the sun! :)

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