” My father still reads the dictionary everyday. He says your life depends on your power to master words. “Arthur Scargill, 1982.

First I’d like to start with a short biography of Arthur Scargill.

Arthur Scargill, the son and grandson of coals miners, was born in 1938 in Worshrough Dale, Yorkshire. He was the militant and the controversial president of British National Union of Mineworkers (N.U.M) in 1973 and continued in the post until 1981 then Scargill secured around 70% of the vote. He led the longest and one of the most violent dispute and miner’s strike in British labor history which began on March 12, 1984, lasted for a year before ending failure. For instance, the media characterised the strike as “Scargill’s strike”. Scargill founded the socialist Labour Party on 13 January 1996.

Let me discuss Scargill’s quote:

“My father still reads the dictionary everyday. He says your life depends on your power to master words”.

Even if his father was a coal miner, he was civilized and he read the most important book in the world. A book where you can find the definition of every word that exists. There are many kinds of dictionaries such as dictionaries which give a list of words in the alphabetical order and explain what they mean, dictionaries which list words in a language and give translations in another one, spelling dictionaries or thesauruses…

Moreover a French proverb says: “Do not judge a book by its cover”. A good example proving why this quote is wrong is when you are looking for a job, the employer judges you by the way you speak. Furthermore when you’re talking with your friends, your family, your teacher, or your colleagues, if you say a displaced word, or say a word which is out of context, they’ll correct you in a forthright manner.

Finally I would like to add that I find Scargill's quote very human and right and that it describes perfectly the society we live