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The
Martha's Vineyard Times is a weekly publication.
July 21 - July 27, 2005 Edition
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Word magic July 21, 2005 By Doug Cabral Among their many attributes, words are useful, playful, sometimes hurtful, even mysterious. Most have stories — birth, youth, middle age, transitions, old age, even (horrors) what the popular sociologists call passages. Good words go bad. Bad words are redeemed. New words come to life. Old, disused words are revivified and set to work in unfamiliar circumstances, in which they quickly make places for themselves. Some of these changes add meanings, some put longtime, familiar meanings out of bounds, under pressure from current culture. Dictionaries keep track of all this, but they are slow. Words are lively and protean, dictionary editors are less so, and often they resist the changes that common usage insists upon, until resistance is futile and giving in is the only choice remaining. Still, stubborn unwillingness to accept change can have its rewards (yippee). Many a dictionary editor has lived on after succumbing to a change only to realize a satisfying I-told-you-so moment when a word the editor never wanted to add to the lexicon in the first place flames out after a brief (I mean dictionary time, which is measured by the hundreds of years) moment in vogue. For example, remember daddy-o, created by an early form of cosmetic surgery performed on the familiar and loving patronymic we all know and adore. Thanks to the beat generation it acquired a kind of double agent’s life. On the one hand, it could be used to mean the sort of man now known as a cool dude, maybe a musician. On the other, it could ridicule an older guy, father or not, who just plain missed the point, and did so repeatedly. Apparently, this latter meaning has been supplanted, at least by my children, by the hyphenated mutation duff-man, built on the root duffer. If you wonder how a word can be used alternatively in complimentary and derogatory senses, you’re going to ask some cool cat, er, dude. It escapes me. Anyway, what’s the best way to track these changes so that you are always on firm ground word-wise? The question arises because of an e-mail from Aushra Galley of Edgartown, who wrote to take amiable issue with a word discussed in this space last week. “After reading Mr. Cabral’s ‘At Large’ column entitled ‘Watch It,’” Ms. Galley wrote, “I decided to head for my dictionary (Random House Webster’s College Dictionary, 2000 Second Revised Edition) to check on a hunch and sure enough, the definition given for ‘disfranchise’ is ‘to disenfranchise,’ a word which, according to Mr. Cabral, does not exist in the English language. Now I’m really confused. Please advise.” Happy to advise, but first, a quibble. I did not write that disenfranchise does not exist. It does, as Ms. Galley correctly reminds us. What I said was disenfranchise is not a word welcomed in The Times letters columns. I think Ms. Galley raises an issue that has to do with what dictionary one chooses to use — a common dilemma. Dictionaries have different personalities. Some are more agreeable than others, more accepting, more inclusive. Some are stricter, more old-fashioned. Ms. Galley, quite reasonably, referred to the Random House Webster’s College Dictionary, an excellent choice, but in the view of some perhaps a little lenient, go with the flow, if it feels good, fine. And that can lead to trouble. Now, you can spend a lot of time trying to decide which dictionary is easy going, which is a taskmaster, but here’s a simple test. Measure them. What you are looking for is the thickest dictionary you can find. And, no paperbacks, please. Your typical college dictionary might measure, say, 2.75 inches, if you’re lucky. Respectable, but hardly the rock on which to build your lexicon. Now, something like Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, there’s a dictionary with heft enough to be considered authoritative. Four and a quarter inches of the very best. It’s the next best thing to the Oxford English Dictionary, 20 volumes, that’s 40 inches plus. If the key to getting the right word and knowing what it means is how thick your dictionary is, and that’s the standard we’re advocating here, well it’s the OED hands down. The OED and Webster’s Third, a combined 45 inches or more of dictionary, unquestionably prefer disfranchisement, and so should you. There is an extra-dictionary test one can apply to such a competition as that between disfranchise and disenfranchise. To find the best word, unlike the best dictionary, you are often looking for the thinnest, not the thickest. You don’t want an OED-type word if you can avoid it. You want a paperback-type word with the fewest syllables that will do the job. By this measure, disfranchise is the clear winner, just three syllables that carry the same meaning as disenfranchise’s four. That “en” really adds nothing. So, in dictionaries think thick; in words, thin. |
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