The way things were …

… The Magical Power of Dictionaries - The Chronicle of Higher Education. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

In school we were taught to be curious. Whenever we asked a teacher what something meant, we were told to "look it up in the dictionary!" We never thought of this as a punishment. On the contrary: With this command we were given the keys to a magic cavern in which one word would lead without rhyme or reason (except an arbitrary alphabetical reason) to the next.