Coordinating narratives of fear via expensive dictionaries could be "a thing"

Recently, I was very surprised to notice that my huge, library-discard 1971 dictionary has the word "Palestine" on the first line of the first column of page 2024. The land of Palestine was prominent in the news in the year 2024, after the 2023 music festival attack and then the invasion of Gaza land strip by the Mediterranean Sea, which invasion continued through the end of 2024. 

The guideword "scallion" at the top of the column has an obvious little mark on the "a" in it. "A" is the first letter of the alphabet and corresponds to the number 1:

Is the appearance of "Palestine" on the first row a mere coincidence? Could it be that the invasion of Gaza was somehow foreshadowed by a dictionary in 1971? Or was it used as some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy?

Lots of dictionary words have font typos and stray marks. They don't necessarily mean anything. But I've seen enough now to realize that I should withhold placing trust in the information gatekeepers of the publishing/printing world. 

I decided to look for pages with the same number as some important historical years and see if counting lines forwards/backwards---as per the letter values of matching letters with bumps/concavities in the guidewords--could possibly lead to refererences to significant world events. 

Possible references included a mention of the West Indies and tropical America on page 1492, a reference to a behind ("rere") account on page 1929, a reference to rewarding/requiting bad deeds on page 1945, a reference to Manila on page 1973, a reference to infection with a virus from page 2020, a reference to skin pustules on page 2022, and a reference to tropical America on page 2023. These correspond, respectively, with Columbus's discovery of the Americas in 1492, the 1929 bank runs at the start of the Great Depression, punishing Japan with 2 atomic bombs in 1945, solidifying of the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines, COVID, monkeypox, and the Venezuelan mass emigration. The 1492 and 1945 coincidences are especially remarkable.

I looked at page 2026 and saw the guideword marks led me to a line about a scarecrow being "a human figure set up to frighten." Our current President, Donald Trump, has got nearly every segment of the US population and Europe frightened about something by now on issues as diverse as immigration enforcement, NATO security, civil rights, inflation, freedom and good governance, etc.

Are there really people in publishing using the same edition of an authoritative dictionary to help determine and coordinate what will make headlines in future years? Corrupt, war-inciting behavior in publishing has been known to be a "thing" since "yellow journalism" got the USA into the Spanish-American War in 1898.  

This dictionary is from 1971, so any odd coincidences of world headlines, years, and page numbers after 1971 merit investigation.

Page 2002 of the dictionary deserves special scrutiny. The two guidewords and the page number all refer to the Levant and upper Mesopotamia (see photos below). That's three different references to the Middle East's Biblical lands. In 2002, the USA pushed very hard for and eventually got UN permission to attack Iraq, using arguments that with time now appear mostly unsubstantiated. If modern day "yellow journalism" (possibly coordinated via expensive dictionaries) is why we invaded Iraq, the people serving in the US military have been horribly exploited.

The tiny font deviations in the guideword lead to the line about Jacob meeting his wfe, which happened in upper Mesopotamia.

The tiny deviations in the page number 2002 lead to the bottom of the previous column...

...where there is a reference to Jesus, who lived in the Levant.

Here is the guideword over the third column. The resolution is good enough you should be able to see the mark on the letter "m".

The marks on the guideword lead to the line with "salading", a word I have never read before, which is given a pronunciation that fits Saladin, the famous 12th-century sultan over Palestine and Syria.