I'm glad to know I'm not the only one whose favoured childhood reading was the "compact" OED in tinyprint. That and the '57 and '67 encyclopaedia britannicas - I spent a year (in the 80's) charting the progress of mankind's knowledge in that decade - effectively a manual diff.

Thinking about it, I now zyxt that this was probably strange.

That's a very nice article. Really makes you think about the way languages and the meanings of words evolve over time.