Serendipity, in all its glory! (CleverKeys)

Name: Shazzy

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Product:	CleverKeys
Date:	14/03/02 (178 review reads)
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This is brilliant! Superb! Splendid! Terrific! I love it! It’s really good!

Who’d have thought that such a diddy computer programme would ever bring me to such a level of excitement? Had anybody ever suggested that this would happen to me, I’d have said “ha, ha, ha.” I just do not get excited about these things. I find them useful, but I don’t get excited about them. Did you hear that? I don’t get excited about things like this. It just isn’t me. And yet here I am, sat at my PC, having spent the last couple of hours playing with a tiny computer programme that’s as simple as they come.

CleverKeys is a nifty piece of software that’s downloaded free from dictionary.com. Guess what it does? Yes, 10 points to the lady in the back row! It looks up words! Not only that, but it looks up words from whatever programme you happen to be in.

All you have to do is highlight the word you want to look up and press control-L (from a PC - the mac version is probably different). That’s it. A browser window opens (or it uses a previously opened window) and the entry at dictionary.com is displayed. Is that cool or what?

A lot of you will already know that I spent most of my adult life abroad, speaking a foreign language. Coming back to the UK after so many years away was a bit freaky really. It was almost like being a foreigner in my own country. I’d lived away for 18 years and during the last 14 of them, spoke, read and wrote very little English. I heard it on TV regularly, although more often than not it’d be American English. But just hearing it isn’t the same as actually using the language. I came back to England as a 38 year old with more or less the same vocabulary that I went away with as a 19 year old.

I thought in Norwegian and had to “switch” to English whenever I spoke. I don’t do that anymore; I’ve been back over 4 years no
w and think in both languages, although rarely at the same time. Unless I’m drunk. I still have to make good use of a dictionary and thesaurus though. Not always to look up words I want to use (although I do – a lot) but to look up words I come across on a day-to-day basis. Words like “serendipity”.

I honestly can’t remember ever having used “serendipity” before I left the UK. I can’t say I can ever remember any of my friends using it either and my parents certainly didn’t. In fact, I’m sure that if I were to say “One the greatest joys of the web is serendipity”, they’d look at me as if I’d just got out of the loony bin! Honestly. People in the old East End just didn’t use big words. It wasn’t the done thing at all.

But I like words. I like to read and write and believe me, I like to talk! I could talk for the country. Because I like words, I also like to know what they mean. That’s logical isn’t it? If I see a word that I don’t understand, I want to understand it. I hate being left in the dark. My curious nature makes that almost unbearable. I want to know and I want to know NOW!

So that’s where this little gem of a programme comes in useful. I know I could’ve just opened a new browser window myself, typed in www.dictionarly.com, got an error message due to the misspelling which was probably caused by my over eagerness to find the word, typed it in again without the L, waited for the page to load, highlighted “serendipity” (because at this point, I probably still wouldn’t be able to spell it), copied and pasted it into the search box, clicked “go” (or whatever it is) and waited for the result. It sounds like a big operation, but it isn’t really. But even though it isn’t a big operation, CleverKeys makes it sooo much easier. Highlight, control-C, bingo!

The only com
plaint I have is that whenever you highlight a word on a web page, it’ll use the same window to transport you to dictionary.com, which means you’ll lose the page you were on. That’s annoying. I’d like it to open a new browser window regardless of where I’m doing my search from. It’s easy enough to get back to where you were by clicking the back button or whatever (I’m sure some of you use short-cuts for that but I’m a clicker myself), but there are times when I want to read the dictionary entry and then re-read the original sentence where I first found the word. I might flit back and forth a few times between the pages before I’m satisfied, and I can’t do that quite as easily anymore. I have to keep going backwards and forwards within the same window. Oh, the trials we have to endure in this life!

That’s my only grouch. If you can live with that, I’m sure you’ll find it handy.

There’s more though. You can use thesaurus.com (Roget’s Thesaurus and sister site to dictionary.com) to look up synonyms too. By using “control-M” after highlighting the word, you can choose thesaurus instead of dictionary. That’s handy, isn’t it? Serendipity isn’t listed though.

As if that isn’t enough, you can also use CleverKeys to search the web. Dictionary.com have teamed up with “mamma” (search engine – American – rarely ever use it myself), thus allowing you to highlight a word or title and search for things about it. Like “diazepam” or “Chislehurst Caves”. It works too.

Then there’s the bit that I’m sick and tired of seeing on just about every search engine I’ve ever visited. The link to Amazon.com. Search for books about “keyword”. Yeah, I suppose it can be useful on the odd occasion, but I can honestly say that I’ve never yet used the “
;search for books on…” option on any search engine. And anyway, I don’t want to use the .com version. Amazon has a huge warehouse near Milton Keynes; you can see it from the M1, and that’s where I want my online book orders to come from.

I was looking for something completely different (an antonym, if you must know) when I came across CleverKeys. But all you have to do is go to www.dictionary.com and follow the link “Cool Tools” from the front page. Then you click on “CleverKeys”, choose the PC or Mac option, register your name and email address if you want to (yes, that’s right, registration isn’t obligatory) and Bob’s your uncle, off you go. Download in progress.

Installation’s a breeze and took less than a minute on my somewhat archaic PC. It really is tiny too. The whole thing uses no more than about 394 kb of disk space. That’s like a speck of dust compared to most of the stuff that gets installed on my PC these days.

Of course, you can’t use it if you’re not logged onto the net. But that’s pretty obvious isn’t it? I’m usually logged on whenever I’m on the computer though. I’ll write a bit, surf a bit, read a bit, write a bit, talk to whoever else is online, talk to other people in the real-world room that I’m sitting in, write a bit, read a bit, and so it goes on. If you're like me, you’ll find this programme very useful I’m sure, but if you prefer to work offline, forget it. Either it’s very useful or it’s not. There’s no in between thing. No murky grey area where the water tastes nasty.

I’ve yet to find a programme it hasn’t worked with. I’ve tried it from Word, Outlook Express, Internet Explorer, Netscape, MSN and Yahoo Messenger and it works with them all. It’s brilliant. It really is. I love it.

And in case you’re wondering
what “serendipity” means, go to dictionary.com, look it up and then download CleverKeys while you’re there. The dictionary entry’ll even tell you the history of the word, which is actually quite interesting.

Go on… off you go. You know you want to try it.


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