![]() ![]() I liked aw-shucks, down-home words, such as bumpkin, chatterbox, horselaugh, and mumbo-jumbo. ![]() I soon discovered I liked angular, brittle words, such as cantankerous, impecunious, rebuke, and straitlaced. “I decided, quite consciously (though misguidedly), that if a big vocabulary impressed girls, I could excel at it as nobody ever had.” I resolved to copy out, by hand, 30 good ones per day-and to do it without fail. ![]() I wanted serviceable words and remarkable words. I took it down and started scouring the pages for interesting, genuinely useful words. 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 decided, quite consciously (though misguidedly), that if a big vocabulary impressed girls, I could excel at it as nobody ever had. A pretty girl in my neighborhood, Eloise, said to me, with big eyes and a smile: “You know, you have a really big vocabulary.” I had used the word facetious, and that prompted her comment. Then, in 1974, when I was 15, one of the most important events of my life took place. I started wondering what was in that big book. When I was four, in 1962, my grandfather used Webster’s Second New International Dictionary as my booster seat. You’re asking me to psychoanalyze myself? Okay, it’s true. ![]() There must be a further backstory to a teenager who suddenly falls in love with usage books. That was 41 years ago, and it ended up being my first book with Oxford University Press. I started my first one ( A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage) when I was 23, and I’ve been at it ever since. I suppose in retrospect it looks predictable that I’d end up writing a usage dictionary. I spent far more time on these books than I did on my schoolwork. I was steeped in English usage-as a kind of closet study. By the time I’d graduated from high school, I added Wilson Follett, Bergen Evans, and Theodore Bernstein to the mix. By the time I was 17, I’d memorized virtually every linguistic stance taken by Partridge and Fowler, and I was thoroughly imbued with their approach to language. 1965), and when it arrived I decided it was even better. So when I got home, I ordered Fowler’s Modern English Usage (2d ed. In fact, I didn’t even ski the first day: I was soaking up all that I could from Usage and Abusage, which kept mentioning some mysterious man named Fowler. I stuck it in my bag and didn’t open it until we arrived at the ski lodge. And then Partridge had essays on such linguistic topics as concessive clauses, conditional clauses, elegancies, hyphenation, negation, nicknames, and obscurity (“It may be better to be clear than clever it is still better to be clear and correct.”).Īt the age of 16, I was going on a ski trip with friends, and the book had just arrived in the mail as I was leaving for New Mexico. Partridge discussed every “problem point” in the language-words that people use imprecisely, phrases that professional editors habitually eliminate, words that get misspelled because people falsely associate them with similar-looking words, the common grammatical blunders, and so on. I discovered Eric Partridge’s Usage and Abusage (1942) and immediately felt that it was the most fascinating book I’d ever held. In my case, it was matter of falling in love with the genre as a teenager. What possesses someone to undertake a usage dictionary? I was happy to talk to Bryan Garner-who has been called “the least stuffy grammarian around” and was declared a “genius” by the late David Foster Wallace-about what it means to write a usage dictionary. The fifth edition of Garner’s Modern English Usage has recently been published by OUP. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |