Dictionaries, Dime Bags and Doxastic Attitudes

This is a story about a girl and a book. Bear with me.

For my birthday this year, I told my parents that I wanted a dictionary when they asked. Not the kind most people have, not the abridged paperback version people carry to school. I have one of those. I wanted a full-on, I-need-a-perch-for-it-in-my-apartment kind of dictionary. The only reason that I did not already own one was due to the price tag. I had a specific one picked out- The American Heritage Dictionary, Fourth Edition. My mother made an earnest attempt to purchase said item from Barnes & Noble, but got overwhelmed and sidetracked by a sales associate. I received, instead, a gift card, given with the advice that the book would be $15 cheaper if I bought it online. Indeed it was. I placed my order and waited for my dictionary to arrive. I had to have it delivered to my store, however, since they would not leave the book at the door of my apartment. So it goes.

When the call came that I had a package, I practically skipped to retrieve it. I brought it to the room where the management gang was having lunch that day, and proceeded to open my present. Packages drawing the attention that they do, eyes were on me as I pulled the book from the box. I have been informed that I did, in fact, hug my new dictionary in my moment of shiny-new-object delight. I then had to explain my need for a dictionary of this size, and my choice of said volume. I got teased soundly. The book came home with me and has lived on my dining room table ever since.

A few weeks later, I found that I could not remember which president was on the dime. My smaller paperback dictionary simply stated that a dime was a ten cent coin in the US and Canada. Thinking that I may be able to find this piece of information in my very large dictionary, I flipped to the entry for dime. Though the president depicted on the coin was not found therein(it happened to be Roosevelt), I did find a more expansive definition of dime. One entry included was slang for dime bag. Sure enough, the entry below was for dime bag: a specified amount of an unlawful drug, packaged and sold for a fixed price, usually around ten dollars. So, the first difference I have noted between my big dictionary and my little dictionary is the inclusion of slang about drugs. Great.

Fast forward a few more weeks. I am back in school and doing a lot of reading for my philosophy class containing words that I think are there largely to make the authors sound as though they have better vocabularies than they do. A word kept popping up that I could not grok: doxastic. I pulled out the little dictionary: not there. I moved over to the table with the big dictionary: also not there. I had to wait until class to find out that doxastic refers to our attitudes about propositions: either we believe, we disbelieve, or we suspend judgement. So, I am currently a bit lost with respect to my doxastic attitude about the purchase of my dictionary and the word doxastic itself. Either philosophers are making up words that have not gotten the seal of approval from the people making dictionaries, or my dictionary favors adding drug-related slang over less-common, pseudo-scientific intellectual words. I may have to suspend judgement on this one until the next puzzling word comes up for defining.