I guess 6 or more times most days, I look up some curiosity item in Google Search or Duckduckgo or both. Most of the time, I get many more results in Google than in Duck but that is fine. Sometimes, I want somewhat stripped down results and sometimes more. I almost never get beyond the first page or two of the results. I am impressed at how just a moment of looking at the results broadens or redirects my thoughts.
Today, I was thinking about the expression "getting his dander up", that is, becoming angry. I wasn't sure about where or what his dander was. I guess it may actually have to do with dandruff, dried, scalp skin.
I think of either search site as something like the card catalog I used in a library. These days, I look around for a computer that can find items located in a library but as a kid, we didn't have computers yet. Back then, I looked up a title and got a filing number. The number guided me to a section of shelves, where I looked more minutely for the book. Sometimes, it had been borrowed so I had to try again in a week or so. I do think that not finding a book tended to strengthen my urge to look at it and I tended to remember that book the next time I was in the library.
I read that at one time, there was no organized file to use to locate a book thought to sometimes be available in that library. The best bet then was to ask a librarian if she knew where that book was. My wife's PhD thesis had to do with librarians facing many new types of collections of items that weren't shaped like books and presented storage and access problems, such as software and slide-tape presentations.
I also read in "A Place for Everything: the Curious History of Alphabetical Order" by Judith Flanders that items were something thought to be properly filed according to their importance to God. Later, it became acceptable to shelve them according to the first letter of the author's last name. Quite a bit later, it was ok to order books by the other letters in the author's name, not just the first one.
