still drinkin! We got'em!

It is kind of funny that you would mention obsession with language. This weekend I was watching my favorite cable channel, Book TV on C-SPAN. I listened, for the second time, to a lecture by author Simon Winchester about his wonderful book, The Meaning Of Everything. (about the history of the Oxford English Dictionary) Probably not a lot of people would willingly sit through such a lecture, let alone in rapt attention but I did, twice. I love words and language so much that nothing is more enjoyable to as sitting with a pile of dictionaries (or, preferably, one great one) and following the threads of etymology through history. The O.E.D. was a departure from the past and a great innovation because it sought only to record the use of words, not to be prescriptive. Its editors were among the first to understand the dynamic, almost living qualities of language. The French continue to fight a futile battle to exclude foreign words from being included in their lexicon, but English keeps growing and has become the richest of languages just because of that process. In my undergraduate years, I was for a while an Archeology student. I am convinced that the greatest archeological sites on earth are our languages. Each one has threads of meaning and history that predate the written word and a source of knowledge that is quite literally inexaustable.

You are more than welcome, and thanks for your sugestions and those of several other thoughtful posters.