Look It Up
I grew up the youngest of three kids. I have a distinct memory of being told to “look it up” whenever I didn’t understand what my family members were talking about.
As a child of the 80s, I grew up with one of those encyclopedia sets—you know the ones, with the black and red cover, shiny golden lettering. Ours included a matching dictionary. For simpler subjects, I would consult Big Bird’s Sesame Street Dictionary, but these inquiries usually took me to Collier’s. Eventually we graduated to Encarta ’95 on our desktop computer. That felt like I had a world of information at my fingertips!
Big Bird could be trusted to help me out.
But those early years of learning to seek out information have served me well. Now, I look up words and concepts daily. Whenever one of my kids asks me a question I can’t readily answer, I say, “let’s look it up!”
Here are some of the random things I have looked up in recent weeks:
Convert KG to Lbs (Numbers are not my strong suit.)
Hapkido belts (My daughter just earned her yellow belt.)
Yeti vs. Bigfoot (No, a yeti is not just a white bigfoot.)
Moon Phases (Waning gibbous, anyone?)
Ocarina (Apparently this is an actual musical instrument.)
Huggy Wuggy (The twins kept talking about him and I was very confused.)
Can cats see pink? (I feel like my cat Oscar loves pink, but apparently cats don’t see pink.)
What are Agates? (One of my twins broke their sister’s pink agate.)
Fact-checking is an important component of editing, even in fiction. If an author gets a fact wrong, it hurts their credibility throughout their writing. It can pull a reader out of a story. It can bother a reader so much that they stop reading.
As I have edited manuscripts, I have looked up such things as:
Age when babies make eye contact
Types of martial arts
Drive time from Los Angeles to New York
Symptoms of internal bleeding
Chinese monasteries
Distance you can ride a horse in a day
How far is horizon from beach
Size of muskrats
And of course, I look up a lot of words! Merriam-Webster is one of my most frequently visited websites. I even keep a list in my phone of unfamiliar words I come across.
My favorite so far: pulchritudinous.
