Rec'd (a year after languagehat) the very handsome Lee Valley reprint of Admiral W.H. Smyth's 1867 The Sailor's Word-Book--certainly the best single volume let's-get-lost browsing dictionary I've encountered since the Dictionary of Newfoundland English, enjoyable too on the level of Webster or Johnson in that it is so manifestly the work of one mind, but am sobered (if not discouraged) by magisterial naval historian N.A.M. Rodger's withering entry in the bibliography of his four-masted "The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain 1649-1815"--"An extensive but haphazard, unscientific and often ambiguous posthumous work, heavily used by the editors of the "Oxford English Dictionary" for their forays into nautical vocabulary, in many cases with unfortunate consequences." Ouch! ten points for the double diss, five points for the use of "foray", which made me imagine the hapless land-lubber OED editors bailing like Jumblies in their sieve...