Notlong ago, my son asked me about the meaning of a word in a novel he was leading for his fifth-grade book club.
“Look it up,” I responded, my automatic rejoinder when my children ask me the meaning of a word, which is often.
“But my screen time is off,” he whined. We were sitting next to a book shelf that held at least three dictionaries, plus a thesaurus. I looked pointedly at the shelf, and my son sighed dramatically. “Can’t you just use your phone?” he asked.
A terrifying thought occurred to me. “Do you even know how touse a dictionary?” This was my second son, and it turned out that my sureness ofhaving taught him something was often a transplanted memory
