Define "nearest."

This entry is based off of a livejournal prompt/meme. The text of the prompt is as follows:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open the book to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the next seven sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

I wouldn't ordinarily bother with something like this, for relatively self-evident reasons, but as it happens, this was funny, because of all the trouble I had to go to to find a usable book.

The first book I saw was my Collins-Gem English-Russian/Russian-English Dictionary (ISBN 0-00-458665-4). This contains no sentences at all for several hundred pages.

The second book was a little tricker: closest by what metric? Closest to my hand? Closest to my fundament? Closest horizontally, ignoring vertical distance?

Well, closest at hand is probably the Wordsworth Concise German Dictionary (English-German, German-English) (ISBN 1-85326-330-3): it is much more comprehensive than the pocket Russian dictionary, and since the word catch appears as an entry on that page, there are a number of full example sentences scattered throughout; but finding the next seven would be an exercise in tedium greater than I have the patience to engage in.

The closest horizontally would be Elementary Classical Greek, Revised Edition (ISBN 0-8093-1795-8). Its page 56 is taken up mostly by tables of declensions of comparative and superlative adjectives, and it only has four actual sentences.

Closest to my fundament is a tie, I think, between Zork: The Cavern of Doom (ISBN 0-812-57985-2), and Colloquial Kansai Japanese (ISBN 0-8048-3723-6).

(At this point I should interject and confess that I have not actually cracked open Zork or Greek before today, and have gotten all of three or four pages into Kansai.)

So here is the relevant text from Kansai (starting slightly after the fifth sentence, since that would break into an example dialogue, and omitting the Japanese characters because I don't have a usable IDE right now):

However, unlike mōkarimakka, bochi-bochi is still used quite frequently in Kansai. It can be an effective neutral response to any embarrassing question you do not want to answer.

HIRAKATA: Ima no shigoto, susunden no?
IBARAGI: Mā, bochi-bochi ya na.
HIRAKATA: How's the project progressing?
IBARAGI: Moving along slowly.

HORIUCHI: Kansai-ben, mō nareta?
PALTER: Mā, bochi-bochi ya na.
HORIUCHI: Have you gotten used to the Kansai dialect yet?
PALTER: Getting there.

And Zork, which barely squeaks by in sentence count:

The warning explained that using a Frobozz Magic Compressor more than three times in one day can [sic] cause the machine's delicate magic circuits to overload. Sure enough, in the middle of producing a diamond, the compressor explodes. The resulting pyrotechnic display removes Bivotar, Juranda, and a good chunk of the coal mine.

THE END
Your score is 3 out of a possible 10 points. Well, you probably deserve another chance. Turn to page 54 and try again.

... which last bit implies that the book is probably at worst Tough (on the Zarfian scale).

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(Edit 2009-01-19: various bits of cleanup.)