I walked by a store called "Michael's Bespoke Tailors" for five years and never acted on the urge to look up the definition of "bespoke" - I was perfectly content with the vague notion that it meant something along the lines of "custom". Then two days ago I read it in a novel, and immediately went flying to a dictionary.

Apparently literature piques my interest in a way that commerce never will.

When the first dictionary I grabbed didn't give me a definition that made sense in either the context of the sentence I'd just read or tailoring, I took another off the shelf. And when that wasn't any better, I hauled out the Compact Oxford English Dictionary and its accompanying magnifying glass.

I love the Compact OED. It's my Desert Island book, with the stipulation that it comes with, like, a dozen spare magnifying glasses. I wouldn't want to end up in Burgess-Meredith-Time-Enough-at-Last-Twilight-Zone hell. That would suck. Also, the magnifying glass would be handy for lighting fires.

Where was I? Oh, yes - drinking my third not particularly magnifying glass of wine. But before that I was going on about a giant dictionary:

"Compact" is, of course, relative. I hadn't tried to lift the Compact OED since the since the last time I took on Tolkien, but I remembered it and the condition of my back well enough to do a series of warm up stretches first and bend at the knees when lifting it.

I was gratified to find in the definition a specific reference to "bespoke tailors" from the June 13th 1908 edition of the Daily Chronicle, but a bit put out to discover that "bespoke" means, more or less, "custom".

Still, on my way to "bespoke" I noticed that a "bernicle" is a wild goose, and also a valid play in Scrabble, so count me happily enlightened.