As longtime readers of LH will know, I’m not a huge fan of Bryan Garner in his capacity of generalized style maven (though his books on legal usage are excellent), but as I wrote here: “if magisterial guidance, with an occasional twinkle in the eye and lots of citations, is what you want, Garner is your man.” I read Sarah Butcher’s OUP Blog Q&A with interest and pleasure, and I found this bit enjoyable enough to share:
By that time, my grandparents had given me Webster’s Second New International Dictionary, which for years had sat on a shelf in my room. I took it down and started scouring the pages for interesting, genuinely useful words. I didn’t want obsolete words. I wanted serviceable words and remarkable words. I resolved to copy out, by hand, 30 good ones per day—and to do it without fail.
I soon discovered I liked angular, brittle words, such as cantankerous, impecunious, rebuke, and straitlaced. I liked aw-shucks, down-home words, such as bumpkin, chatterbox, horselaugh, and mumbo-jumbo. I liked combustible, raucous words, such as blast, bray, fulminate, and thunder. I liked arch, high-toned words, such as athwart, calumny, cynosure, and decrepitude. I liked toga-wearing, Socratic-sounding words, such as eristic, homunculus, palimpsest, and theologaster. I liked mellifluous, polysyllabic words, such as antediluvian, postprandial, protuberance, and undulation. I liked the technical and quasi-technical terms of rhetoric, such as asyndeton, periphrasis, quodlibet, and synecdoche. I liked frequentative verbs with an onomatopoetic feel, such as gurgle, jostle, piffle, and topple. I liked evocative words about language, such as billingsgate, logolatry, wordmonger, and zinger. I liked scatological, I-can’t-believe-this-term-exists words, such as coprolalia, fimicolous, scatomancy, and stercoraceous. I liked astonishing, denotatively necessary words that more people ought to know, such as mumpsimus and ultracrepidarian. I liked censoriously yelping words, such as balderdash, hooey, pishposh, and poppycock. I liked mirthful, tittering words, such as cowlick, flapdoodle, horsefeathers, and icky.
In short, I fell in love with language.
I think many of us can relate. But I can’t resist pointing out, with copyeditorial schadenfreude, that there is no such book as “Webster’s Second New International Dictionary.” There is, in its stead, a book called Webster’s New International Dictionary: Second Edition Unabridged. Put that in your style guide and smoke it!
Very nice!
I just learned about Ralph Keyes’ new book, The Hidden History of Coined Words, chock full of good words. A book that needs to have existed for a long time.
More serious than his misquoting the name of the dictionary is his misuse of the pluperfect here (capitalized):
By that time, my grandparents had given me Webster’s Second New International Dictionary, which for years HAD SAT on a shelf in my room.
As written, the sentence means that the dictionary sat on a shelf in his room for years before his grandparents gifted it to him, but surely he meant to say that after his grandparents gifted it to him, it sat on a shelf in his room for years (before he took an interest in it).
If so, it should read “By that time, my grandparents had given me Webster’s Second New International Dictionary, which for years was to sit on a shelf in my room.”
>As written, the sentence means that the dictionary sat on a shelf in his room for years before his grandparents gifted it to him, but surely he meant to say that after his grandparents gifted it to him, it sat on a shelf in his room for years (before he took an interest in it).
If I am not mistaken, he meant exactly that “the dictionary sat on a shelf in his room for years before his grandparents gifted it to him”. Check the interview itself. Earlier he says: “When I was four, in 1962, my grandfather used Webster’s Second New International Dictionary as my booster seat”.
Yes, Gleb is correct.
I am not familiar with Mr. Garner’s books. Based on the OUP blog (and elsewhere-reported Nov. 17, 1958 birth), I guess:
1962 (age 4). Grandfather used the big book as his “booster seat,” whether as car seat and/or house (dinner) seat, presumably within grandpa’s domain. Did grandfather live in his house?
1974, age 15. The compliment from pretty Eloise, soon followed by vocab-building vow.
Age 16. Partridge leads to Fowler.
Age 17. Big vocab etc. achieved.
Age 23. Started writing first book.
Date at which grandfather gifted (the same copy of the?) big book, unspecified. Presumably after 1962 but well before 1974.
Maybe.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/02/28/miss-gould calls it Webster’s Second Unabridged . Whatever about 1974, still using W2 in the 90s was…characterising
I’m not saying that that particular dictionary is an example of the phenomenon, but some works and authors acquire conventionalized names, which do not agree with their official ones, yet which are used even in very formal contexts. It’s arguable whether the actual title of Shakespeare’s most famous play is “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark” or “The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,” but it is not just “Hamlet.” I lost points on one of the essays I wrote in my Roman history class, because (following prescribed news journalism practice) I referred to a historian the first time he was mentioned by his actual name “Titus Livius.”
Whatever about 1974, still using W2 in the 90s was…characterising
Maybe that’s unusual for a writer or journalist, but pretty normal for most people who have a dictionary (or, for that matter, an encyclopedia) at home at all – most people used to buy them once in the course of forming their own household library and never updated at all. At my maternal grandparents’ place the Duden German dictionary and the one-volume Knaurs Lexikon were from the early 1960s, probably from when my mother needed them at school or their book club had a special offer, and at my parents’ place they were from the early 70s, and we used both up till the early 2000s, when looking things up on the internet won over.
some works and authors acquire conventionalized names, which do not agree with their official ones, yet which are used even in very formal contexts
Depends on what you mean by “very formal contexts.” Hamlet is irrelevant here — we’re talking about modern books with actual titles, and the dictionary has one. Of course people frequently refer to it as “Webster’s Second New International” or the like, but that’s not its title, and a professional editor, of all people, should be careful about using the actual title in print, especially if they’re going to put it in official itals.
I agree with Hans about normal people not caring which edition of a dictionary they use.
I also agree with Hans. David Remnick mentioning it in Eleanor Gould Packard’s obituary is intentionally characterising.
Whether Garner is characterising his grandfather is less clear. Plausibly he bought W3 or AHD in 196x and passed his old W2 on to his grandson. Conceivably he gave him W2 for fear that he might otherwise be tempted by W3.
The only English dictionary I actually own is a Webster’s Collegiate, 5th ed. 1948, that my grandfather gave my father for Christmas 1947 (sic).
Heh. I own the 8th through the 11th, thanks to my career as a proofreader/editor, and I’d own the 12th if they ever published it. Not to mention Webster’s Third New International Dictionary.
Forgive me if I’m saying something obvious – but mollymooly is presumably referring to the culture war that erupted upon the publication of W3 and has never ended. It’s fair to suspect that Garner – who is nothing if not conservative, in the political, legal, and language senses – continued to use W2 as an act of defiance. Keep in mind that he published his first book, A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage, in 1987- and apparently he did so without consulting W3! For a lexicographer to abjure W3 in favor of W2 is surely an indication of his position on the great dictionary debate.