BOOKS
THOUSANDS OF WORDS - ALL GOOD ONES
THE AMERICAN COLLEGE DICTIONARY. Edited
by
Clorence
L.
Born–
hort. Rondom House. $5.00.
In the vasty shadow of Webster's New International, com–
pleted in its latest form in 1934, there seems to be room for plenty of
other dictionaries, and during the past year three or four new ones of
some pretensions have been published in this great Republic. Of these,
the one here under review is certainly not the meanest. It was put
together by professionals of high competence, it shows good judgment
and good taste in its arrangement and format, and most of its points of
difference from the others are substantial superiorities which give its
promoters plausible excuse for the hullabaloo they are making over it.
The hardest problem confronting a dictionary editor is that of
selection. Even when he undertakes a so-called unabridged work he
soon finds that it is quite impossible to include
all
the words and phrases
in the language. Some are nothing more than nonce-forms that may
serve their purpose and vanish into limbo before his copy can run the
gantlet of his composing-room, e.g.,
globalony, bam,
and
third termite.
Some are foreign loans that remain defectively naturalized and under
strong competition from native forms, e.g.,
ponhoss (pfannhase),
and
trocha.
Yet others are compounds and inflections that have support in
the genius of the language and yet look somehow unnatural and uncouth,
e.g.,
unlevel, broadcasted,
and
alright.
More are technical terms, per–
fectly sound in their proper places, but still lingering outside the fold of
the common speech, e.g.,
glomb
and
hysterectomy.
Finally, there is the
vast vocabulary of transient and often vulgar slang, here today and gone
tomorrow, and the smaller and older but even more vexatious repertoire
of words permanently below the salt, most of them of four letters.
Barnhart has dealt with all these difficulties shrewdly and effec–
tively. In order to get at the basic materials of the language he has
made use of the Thorndike-Lorge word-count-a laborious study which
determined the order of frequency of the first 30,000 words in texts
running to 25,000,000. This super-colossal
Arbeit
also established some-
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