25. ## B
Not long ago, my son Kevin asked me about the meaning of a word in a novel he was reading. “Look it up,” I responded automatically. We were sitting next to a bookshelf holding at least three dictionaries. Kevin sighed dramatically. “Can’t you just use your phone?”
A terrifying thought occurred to me. “Do you even know how to use a dictionary?”
“Of course,” he scoffed. “Every chapter is a different letter.” I laughed out loud. I had never thought of the dictionary as something read from beginning to end.
We pored over a paperback dictionary together. It took Kevin a few tries to find the word, and he was overwhelmed that an entire page could be devoted to words sharing the same three beginning letters. “How can there be this many words?” he asked, with alternating horror and awe.
I was just a bit older than Kevin when I decided to learn as many words as I could, marking every entry I looked up with a small penciled dot. The dictionary was a gift for my 13th birthday. Although neither of my parents went to college, they made clear that my education was a family priority. I marked up my dictionary because I enjoyed the process. I did it for the experience, not the result.
The dictionary was stolen at the end of my freshman year of college. When Kevin asked to see it, a small pain gripped my chest. “The book is gone,” I said.
“That is so sad,” he said. “But you still know all those words, even without the book.”
I realized this was true. It was not the dictionary that got me there. It is not about the words themselves or how we learn them, but the wanting to know them--the curiosity (好奇心) and the
appetite.
25. How did Kevin feel while looking up the word in the dictionary?
D