I think I may be the only man
who enjoyed lying in bed re-reading
THE COLLEGE GUIDE TO GRAMMAR
that every Andover student had to buy
while my girlfriend and her nine-year-old
son were in the living room memorizing
lines from OVER THE RAINBOW on TV.
I also enjoyed reading Webster's entire
3rd Edition Dictionary. It was Dr. Gillingham,
an Andover English teacher who had gotten
his PhD from Oxford, who introduced me
to the HARBRACE VOCABULARY WORKSHOP,
an incredible tool with which to study etymology,
a lifelong hobby of mine. Essentially, one learned
the prefixes, roots, and suffixes of the Anglo-Saxon,
Latin, and Greek languages and thereby was often
able to take an English word, it's meaning as yet un-
known, break it into its parts, and begin to understand
the meaning of the English word. I found this exciting.
The goal was not to become pedantic, but as a poet,
to be able to choose the "precise" word needed to convey
as well as possible the meaning of the entire poem.

What fun!

TOD HOWARD HAWKS