How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [85]
All this indicates that you must know a good deal before you can use a work of reference. Reference books are useless to people who know nothing. They are not guides to the perplexed.
How to Use a Dictionary
As a reference book, the dictionary is subject to all the considerations outlined above. But the dictionary also invites a playful reading. It challenges anyone to sit down with it in an idle moment. There are worse ways to kill time.
Dictionaries are full of arcane knowledge and witty oddments. Over and above that, of course, they have their more sober employments. To make the most of these, one has to know how to read the special kind of book a dictionary is.
Santayana's remark about the Greeks-that they were the only uneducated people in European history-has a double significance. The masses were, of course, uneducated, but even the learned few-the leisure class-were not educated in the sense that they had to sit at the feet of foreign masters. Education, in that sense, begins with the Romans, who went to school to Greek pedagogues, and became cultivated through contact with the Greek culture they had conquered.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the first dictionaries were glossaries of Homeric words, intended to help Romans read the Iliad and Odyssey as well as other Greek literature employing the "archaic" Homeric vocabulary.. In the same Aids to Reading 1 79
way, many of us today need a glossary to read Shakespeare, or if not Shakespeare, Chaucer.
There were dictionaries in the Middle Ages, but they were usually encyclopedias of worldly knowledge comprised of discussions of the most important technical terms employed in learned discourse. There were foreign-language dictionaries in the Renaissance ( both Greek and Latin ) , made necessary by the fact that the works that dominated the education of the period were in the ancient languages. Even when the socalled vulgar tongues-Italian, French, English-gradually replaced Latin as the language of learning, the pursuit of learning was still the privilege of the few. Under such circumstances, dictionaries were intended for a limited audience, mainly as an aid to reading and writing worthy literature.
Thus we see that from the beginning the educational motive dominated the making of dictionaries, although there was also an interest in preserving the purity and order of the language. As contrasted with the latter purpose, the Oxford English Dictionary ( known familiarly as the OED ) , begun in 1857, was a new departure, in that it did not try to dictate usage but instead to present an accurate historical record of every type of usage-the worst as well as the best, taken from popular as well as elegant writing. But this conflict between the lexicographer as self-appointed arbiter and the lexicographer as historian can be regarded as a side-issue, for the dictionary, however constructed, is primarily an educational instrument.
This fact is relevant to the rules for using a dictionary well, as an extrinsic aid to reading. The first rule of reading any book is to know what kind of book it is. That means knowing what the author's intention was and what sort of thing you can expect to find in his work. If you look upon a dictionary merely as a spelling book or guide to pronunciation, you will use it accordingly, which is to say not well. If you realize that it contains a wealth of historical information, crystallized in the growth and development of language, you will pay atten-180 HOW TO READ A BOOK
tion, not merely to the variety of meanings listed under each word, but also to their order and relation.
Above all, if you are interested in advancing your own education, you will use a dictionary according to its primary intention-as a help in reading books that might otherwise be too difficult because their vocabulary includes technical words, archaic words, literary allusions, or even familiar words used in