Really interesting book

Defining the World, by Henry Hitchings. The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary.

I've always had only vague notions of this person and his work. A really enjoyable and enlightening read, about the very first effort to systematize and codify the English language.

I notice that Dr. Johnson was a late arrival - his father was past 50 and his mother past 40 when he, their firstborn, came into the world. And this was no modern birth in a hospital: it was 1709. The year the pianoforte was invented.

I've also been reading about that. Apparently the real attraction of the pianoforte was that it put a period forever to the perennial complaint concerning the harpsichord, virginal, and all other keyboard instruments of that era -- namely, their aural monotony, caused by those instruments' inability to produce variations in volume and tone. Since the pianoforte employed, for the first time, hammers to strike the strings (rather than pluck them), those hammers could strike in accord with the precise degree of force the player applied to the keyboard that controlled the hammer action.

We took the wonderchild to see Over the Hedge at the local multiplex today. It was better than I'd expected, though entirely predictable in most part. But it introduces to impressionable young minds the radical notion that we humans aren't the only ones with a right to inhabit this planet. It also poked fun at overweight Americans, junk food, suburban landscapes, SUVs, exterminators, and neighborhood organizer types. Methinks the screenwriter might be a (gasp!) liberal!?!?