Does anybody ever get the desire to read a dictionary or encyclopedia

Everyone should read a dictionary cover to cover before starting to engage in serious literature

Turns out the zebra did it

malcolm x did that and someone killed him

Reading a dictionary is stupid as hell, especially in English since there are no legal institution to manage it. What are you going to read? The great mighty OED that elected an emoji “word of the year”? You'd make a far better allocation of your time learning Latin, morphology or merely English derivation and actually figuring out where does the language come from and how it structured itself.

>>8494159
Are parrots called parrots because they parrot or does their parroting give rise to their name?

>>8494159
>8494159

This could easily be gotten around by reading a dictionary from the turn of the 19th/20th century instead that's atleast 50-100 years old and you avoid worrying about memes.

Some topical encyclopedias, but reading a dictionary or general reference encyclopedia cover to cover just strikes me as insane.

I know Borges read the Naturalis Historia but I also know that nigger was just far more dedicated to reading than I'll ever be.

>>8495448
Borges was a sick kid with no friends and nothing else to do, he might just be the best read author in history.

>>8494098
Not just one English dictionary, but the top 5, including the full 12-volume OED, and at least 2 others containing etymological derivations. In addition to at least 20 others, each in various languages. Only then can one qualify as a true /lit/ patrician.

You sound like a monolingual pleb, fuck off.