At the SIWC I was looking at a trade table with a lot of dictionaries when a title struck my eye: English-Portuguese Dictionary: New edition now in colour.
This I had to see, so I flipped it open. Turned out it was the text on the individual entries that was in colour: a nice bold turquoise blue.
Whew! I had been afraid that this dictionary would be full of colour pictures.
There are times when I worry about the loss of our ability to read a sustained piece of unillustrated text, and this time I had almost let the paranoia overwhelm me.
There are consolations. Even if we are less able to focus on reading for long periods, we are more visually literate than ever before. Some say we are also much more savvy and better-informed and it would be hard to argue against that view.
It's just that each generation is formed by the environment in which it thrives, and I grew up surrounded by written words. When I left home at 18, my parents still had no TV.
I know, that makes me sound about a thousand years old, but really, I'm not. Lots of us with such memories are still living. No coloured entry word dictionaries for us, thanks. We don't need them. The pix are all in the imagination.
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