Copyright 1987 The Washington Post The Washington Post
November 8, 1987, Sunday, Final Edition
SECTION: BOOK WORLD; PAGE X1
LENGTH: 968 words
HEADLINE: Brave New Words: A Dictionary for Today
BYLINE: T.R. Reid
BODY: THE RANDOM HOUSE DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE Second Edition, Unabridged
Edited by Stuart Berg Flexner Random House. 2,510 pp. $ 79.95
STRANGE
AS it may seem today, one of the issues that got the nation's
columnists and editorial writers all lathered up a quarter-century ago
was a dictionary. Taking time off from opining on the Cuban missile
crisis, the pundits of 1962 thundered against a huge volume popularly
known as Webster III -- that is, the third edition of Merriam-Webster's
New International Unabridged Dictionary.
The
problem that angered the editorialists -- including those at The
Washington Post, who urged readers to boycott the book and stick with
Webster II, published in 1934 -- was that Webster III was permissive.
It described usage, but declined to dictate which words and meanings
were correct or respectable.
As is their
wont, readers basically ignored the punditry and made Webster III a
commercial success; it's still available today, slightly updated, for $
79.95. But publishers responded by turning out new dictionaries less
tainted by permissiveness. The most conservative response was the American Heritage
Dictionary (now available in a college edition for $ 15.95), which
included stern notes describing some widespread usages as
"unacceptable" or just wrong. Somewhere in the middle was a completely
new unabridged dictionary that Random House put out in 1966.
I
used the Random House Dictionary of the English Language for 20 years
and grew to love it for its comprehensiveness and clarity. But now I've
found an unabridged dictionary that's bigger and better: the Random
House Dictionary of the English Language: Second Edition, or RH II.
This enormous volume is a fine dictionary, beautifully printed and
generously illustrated, with definitions so complete they sometimes
turn downright chatty. But it is also a general family reference book
that includes, inter alia, a 31-page color atlas and quick translating
dictionaries of French, German, Spanish and Italian (frankly, Latin or
Russian would be more useful than the Italian section).
Just
off the press, RH II is almost breathtakingly up-to-date. If you're
confused about the meaning or etymology of "yuppie," "supply sider,"
"nonbank," "golden parachute," "fractal," or "supermicro," you'll find
them all here. RH II's definitions of "contra" include the Nicaraguan
version. The adjective "bad" is defined both in the traditional manner
("not good in any manner or degree") and in the Michael Jackson sense
("outstandingly excellent"). The entry for "superconductivity" mentions
the "recent discovery" changing the word's traditional meaning. The
abbreviations "MADD" (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), "DOS" ("disk
operating system"), and even "AZT," the AIDS drug, are included. For
some reason "SDI" is not. Not all the 50,000 new entries are
neologisms. For years I kept a list of words I couldn't find in the
first Random House unabridged. RH II has done a pretty good job of
rounding them up: "autodidact," "flagon," "machismo," "ombudsman," and
"swivet" all made the new edition, but "paranomastic" and "maladive"
did not.
Reflecting new scholarship of the
past quarter-century, RH II is chock full of charming examples of
American regional usage. It lists, and locates geographically, nine
different terms for a submarine sandwich ("hero," "grinder," "hoagie,"
etc.). It explains such regionalisms as "waiting on line," the New York
City version of waiting in line, and "making down," which means
"raining hard" in parts of Pennsylvania.
On
the burning question of yesteryear -- whether a dictionary should
describe usage or dictate it -- RH II comes down squarely on the
permissive side.
The entry for "between",
for example, offers a sample sentence about "sharing . . . between the
five of us" -- a disturbing model that is offset somewhat by a usage
note saying that "among" is normally used for more than two persons. A
list of "Words Commonly Confused" at the back of the volume includes
the pair "fortuitous" and "fortunate". No wonder -- RH II itself lists
"lucky; fortunate" as a definition of fortuitous and calls this
"standard use." It endorses the passive use of "comprise" -- i.e., "is
comprised of," which grates on me. The entry for "media" says "usually
used with a plural v." but then offers this example: "The media is (or
are) not antibusiness."
In a few cases, RH
II seems to me plain wrong. Can it really be argued in 1987 that the
most common meaning of "gay" is "showing a merry, lively mood"?
("homosexual" doesn't appear until the 5th definition). A "hacker" is
not someone "who attempts to gain unauthorized access to proprietary
computer systems." In computer circles, such a person is a "cracker";
"hacker" refers to a programmer, with no evil connotation. RH II
accepts the name "Fujiyama" for Mt. Fuji, a pure mistake on par with
Japanese spellings like "Olegon" and "Carifornia."
But
these quibbles are, to use a great dictionary word, like
hemidemisemiquavers in a grand symphony. The 2,500 pages of RH II
comprise a wonderfully informative and useful reference tool, without
doubt today's unabridged dictionary of choice (at least until Webster
IV comes along).
In a sense, this hefty
hardback is probably a dinosaur. By the time Random House's third
edition comes out, unabridged dictionaries and other reference books
will have gone beyond paper. RH III will no doubt be published
electronically -- on a CD-ROM system with a a few gigabytes of RAM,
controlled by a DBMS and displayed on a million-pixel screen. If you
don't understand that lingo, go out and buy the Random House Unabridged
-- you'll find it defines every word in that last sentence.
T.R. Reid is Rocky Mountain bureau chief of The Washington Post and author of "The Chip."