Oxford Languages is the online manifestation of the Oxford English Dictionary, the latter of which in its most diminutive form measures almost five cubic feet and weighs in at some 18 pounds—reminiscent of my first laptop computer—and in addition comes with one of the coolest features ever to grace an academic text: a built-in drawer containing its very own magnifying glass.
According to both of these unimpeachable arbiters of the “King’s English”—there’s a term you may not have heard in a while—“homonyms” are words that may be spelled alike, or that may sound alike (or both), but that have “different meanings.” Such is the case with “collecting” and “collecting.”
In its purely financial form, “collecting” is hardly an activity that lends itself to wellness. Instead, it’s one of the most vexing and dispiriting aspects of legal practice. Emanating as it does from a failure to structure and monitor retainers effectively, it places the advocate in the frustrating and mutually embarrassing role of bill collector … all the more dispiritingly whenever the client has occasion to recall that this is occurring in the wake of counsel’s having lost the case.
Far preferable is the form of “collecting” defined by Oxford’s archrival Cambridge (think Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, the Yankees and the Red Sox, or Brandy and Monica). According to the online and recognizably more down-to-earth Cambridge English Dictionary, “collecting” is “to get and keep things of one type such as stamps or coins as a hobby.” The first of these hobbies is “philately,” and the latter is “numismatics,” if for no other reason than to inspire concise pronunciation and to preserve the viability of dictionaries for the foreseeable future.
At least as important as mastery when it comes to engaging in a hobby or any form of casual pursuit is the need to keep things from spiraling out of control. Lawyers are well acquainted with what happens when critique degenerates into libel, when citation expands into plagiarism, or when courtship crosses the line into stalking. Thus, it may be when “collecting” turns into “hoarding.”
For my parents’ generation, there was scarcely a term more repellent than “hoarding.” Second World War posters for the “Home Front” exhorted citizens to “serve just enough; use what is left,” instructing that “if you don’t need it, don’t buy it,” and pointing out quite bluntly that “patriotic” civilians “will not hoard food.” Nowadays, hoarding is viewed more as a condition than as a failing, and indeed for the past decade or so psychiatrists have formally viewed “hoarding disorder” as a form of mental illness meriting clinical treatment.
The sheer amount of what one collects is not the only thing that can raise eyebrows. Sometimes the subject matter itself can be viewed by one’s friends and colleagues as more than a trifle odd. Designed for enthusiasts of any and all callings, the popular website CollecOline has numerous examples of what its experts consider to reflect “a passion for less conventional objects,” including Monopoly games, rubber ducks, navel lint, erasers, umbrella covers, back scratchers, milk bottles, banana tags, fortune cookie messages, and sugar packets. Concerning the last of these, it was noted—replete with photograph—that one collector “has thought of everything to keep it well, like adding a humidifier to her cellar. Sugar is no joke.” One can scarcely disagree.
