Erin McKean’s TED Talk on Redefining the Dictionary is pithy, insightful and interesting. Usually with web video you get to choose just two of those qualities. It’s also the first time since an early lit crit class that I can remember anyone using the word "synecdochical" in any sentence, much less one spoken out loud.

McKean’s talk is about how traditional the form of one of our most common references– the dictionary– is, having hardly changed in hundreds of years (it is essentially steam punk technology) and some pointers to how it might be transformed in the light of distributed, networked knowledge and read/write social webs. Some of this distribution is already happening with online dictionaries and dictionary like things of various kinds, integration of dictionary functions into search engines, Wiktionary, etc… but the importance of this talk is not about dictionaries per se as much as it is the concept of the dictionary as a metaphor for ways the social web can be produce levers for knowledge. And not just in the sense of members of that web contributing to a centralized resource, but participants’ own sites as sources themselves.

The exciting possibility is finding more ways to bring together individual small pieces of word wisdom, from magic words to the insight of  irascible linguist bloggers, from one-letter words to the dictionary of grandiloquence, one that includes inveterate word-coiners and language observers alike.

This talk also has me thinking about the knowledge that we believe is passed down to us from our elders. In the talk, McKean refers to the story of the Ham Butt. My mother not only cuts the ends off the ham before she cooks them (which meant we got to fry that tasty piece up for an early treat) but told me this exact story by explanation, attributing it to my great-grandmother, who confirmed it not long before she died. I still do the same, despite knowing better. I have no doubt my great grandmother believed that she originated the story and my mother certainly believes it is a family anecdote. How much of what we think we know as educators, what we have learned can or can’t or should or shouldn’t be done is Ham Butt wisdom?