THOUSANDS OF WORDS
such nursery terms are so well known on American campuses that putting
everyone of them into a
college
dictionary would be supererogatory. The
same, perhaps, may be said of the older and racier four-letter words, all of
which are familiar, if not to the faculty, then at least to the students, many
of whom have had military training. But why, then, admit
snafu,
the pen–
ultimate element of which is as indecorous as anything in literature,
whether sacred or profane? And why pass over
to goose,
a truly mag–
nificent American verb, and of particular interest because its etymology
is still a mystery?
Barnhart's technical advisers- for example, W. Cabell Greet, Kemp
Malone, Miles L. Hanley, Charles G. Fries, and Allen Walker Read–
are all professors, but they are also men of common sense, and as a
result there is a laudable absence of academic piffle in his dictionary.
There is no attempt to establish rigid standards of pronunciation. What
is good enough for any literate speaker is good enough for these strangely
unorthodox pedagogues. The contrary view, says Fries, who is the fore–
most living American grammarian, "belongs to a pre-scientific period
that still believes the earth to be flat and denies the circulation of the
blood." What English-speaking people actually say is the English lan–
guage: the dictionary can only follow.
If
the speaker is English, or
Bostonese, or of the Hudson Valley pseudo-aristocracy he gives
aunt,
grass, path
the broad
a
of
art
and if he is 100% American he gives them
the
a
of
act,
but it is all one. Both are right, just as both are right when
the Englishman says
lift
and the American says
elevator.
The same thing may be said of speech levels within one country or
the other. "That English is good English," says Harrison Platt, Jr., one
of the new dictionary's assistant editors, "which communicates well the
thought of a given speaker to a given audience." The schoolma'm,
bedeviled by necromancers out of Teachers College, Columbia, still
teaches her laboratory animals that "It it
me"
is "incorrect," but all
American philologians above the rank of floggers of freshmen have long
since agreed that this is nonsense. In the new dictionary the
and
in "try
and
do it" is not denounced as evil and against God, but simply marked
"colloquial." But sometimes, alas, the feet of the learned editors slip,
as when they describe
ain't
as "now illiterate or dialectical." It is, of
course, nothing of the sort. On the contrary, it is perfectly sound every–
day idiom, and may one day be quite as respectable as
isn't.
Even the
double negative, as more than one
avant-garde
philologian has lately
admitted, is a good deal less criminal than the schoolma'm alleges. In
one way, at least, it usually meets a primary specification for all speech:
it is crystal-clear in meaning.
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