I’m just plan excited about today’s guest. In the third hour, Lionel will be joined in-studio by Ammon Shea, confirmed word-nerd and author of the new book Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,370 Pages. Mr. Shea is not only a word fanatic, he’s also a fantastic and very funny writer. To drive this point home, please allow me to excerpt a passage from the exordium (introduction) to his fascinating work:

I do not collect these words because I want to impress friends and colleagues with my erudition. For most of the past ten years while I have been reading dictionaries and collecting words I’ve been employed as a furniture mover in New York, and the words I’ve learned in old dictionaries would be, to put it mildly, singularly inapplicable in that milieu. My friends know that I read dictionaries for fun, and have come to accept this proclivity with relative good grace, but they are not terribly interested in or impressed by my word collection. My girlfriend, Alix, used to be a lexicographer for Merriam-Webster, and she has a considerably greater interest in my word collection than any normal person would…But sometimes I have a sneaking suspicion that she gets slightly irritated, such as when I point out that philoprogeneity and philostorgy both refer to a parent’s love for his or her child. When I asked her about this recently she said, “The point at which I became bored has long since passed.” I’ve chosen to interpret this as a good thing.

This guy hunkered down with a cup of coffee and a magnifying glass and read the Oxford English Dictionary from A to Z, all the while enduring headaches, vision problems, and existential questions about the meaning of this bizarre task he had assigned himself. We should be thankful that he saw it through. As Mr. Shea says of the venerable blue-bound tome, “The fact that the OED cares so much about words that almost everyone else happily ignores is one of its finest traits.” The same can surely said of Mr. Shea.

You know me, folks. I’m easily scared. Like a poor man’s Nostrodamus, I see the end of the world around every corner, and to say that I’m consistently under-whelmed by the behavior of my Fellow Man would be a gross understatement. Nothing shocks me, and yet almost everything I read or hear threatens to unravel the tenuous thread by which I remain linked to this accursed world.

The Internet, like almost everything else I encounter in daily life, is greatly disturbing to me. I do not think it should necessarily be regulated or (god forbid) censored, but I do think it exists as a repository for the repressed hatred and bile of mankind’s collective subconscious. Just take a look at your local Craigslist’s “Rants and Raves” section, and you’ll find enough rambling racism and vile hatred to send you back to bed in a cold sweat. Is it the anonymity offered by online “commenting” that allows this otherwise bottled-up rage to bubble to the surface in the form of rambling, unsettling invective? Does the isolation of online “interaction” encourage hyper-dramatization and thus lead to death threats and allusions to mass murder that would find no foothold in actual face-to-face human interaction? As we retreat further and further in to online conversation as opposed to a real exchange of ideas, are we also dangerously retreating from level-headed consideration of our responsibility to ourselves and others?

On my darker days, I can become victim to an insidious and unhealthy desire to read as much as I can of this online vitriol. It’s like snatching a glimpse of the true face of humanity and watching it melt in to the visage of a jabbering, schizophrenic serial killer and sexual deviant. You can get violently ill from swallowing too much of your own blood, and I see this online world as modern culture vomiting in its own lap. Forget Freud and psychoanalysis; this is all the window we need in to the tortured, self-hating, rudderless core of humanity. Good morning!

Having said all that, you can imagine how much this article contributed to my backsliding in to abject fear of daily life.

Don’t “instant message” me; don’t “leave me a comment”. Just hold me.