Doing the dictionary corner
Posted at 11:30 on 28 Nov 2006 by Pandora / Blake
A friend posted online the other day about an episode of Countdown in which someone used the word muntered: apparently they didn't allow it, but "Mel Giedroyc was doing the dictionary corner and she knew what it meant".
Something about the phrase "doing the dictionary corner" caught my imagination. In a school discipline context, what would doing the dictionary corner involve being sent to the corner to copy words out of the dictionary, perhaps? Words like 'punctuality', 'respect', 'conscientious', to remind errant pupils of the precise meaning of these concepts?
Or perhaps the punishment would match the crime, and the words copied out would be more along the lines of 'disobedient', 'impertinent', 'procrastinatory'. Or, in a modern school setting, perhaps a particularly wayward sixth former might find herself of a Monday morning, copying out through her hangover the definition of 'muntered'.
(Actually, all this is reminding me strongly of being at primary school, where I tended to prefer books to the company of my peers, and spent many a breaktime happily curled up in a corner of the playground, looking up 'spanking' and its cognates in my Concise English Dictionary.)
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