Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [102]
The cites in 2 are almost all from standard authors. Its cite on jocund is from Shakespeare; 3’s is from Elinor Wylie. Under ghastly 2 has cites from Gray (two), Milton (three), Poe, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Shelley, Hawthorne, and—as a slight concession to modernity—Maurice Hewlett. 3 illustrates ghastly with cites from Louis Bromfield, Macaulay, Thackeray, Thomas Herbert, Aldous Huxley, H.J. Laski, D. B. Chidsey, and J.C. Powys. For debonair, 2 has Milton’s “buxom, blithe and debonair,” while 3 has H.M. Reynolds’ “gay, brisk and debonair.” One may think, as I do, that 3 has dropped far too many of the old writers, that it has overemphasized its duty of recording the current state of the language and skimped its duty of recording the past that is still alive (Mr. Reynolds would hardly have arrived at his threesome had not Mr. Milton been there before). A decent compromise would have been to include both, but the editors of 3 don’t go in for compromises. They seem imperfectly aware of the fact that the past of a language is part of its present, that tradition is as much a fact as the violation of tradition.
The editors of 3 have labored heroically on pronunciation, since one of the basic principles of the new linguistic doctrine is that Language is Speech. Too heroically, indeed. For here, as in other aspects of their labors, the editors have displayed more valor than discretion. Sometimes they appear to be lacking in common sense. The editors of 2 found it necessary to give only two pronunciations for berserk and two for lingerie, but 3 seems to give twenty-five for the first and twenty-six for the second. (This is a rough estimate; the system of notation is very complex. Dr. Gove’s pronunciation editor thinks there are approximately that number but writes that he is unable to take the time to be entirely certain.) Granted that 2 may have shirked its duty, one may still find something compulsive in the amplitude with which 3 has fulfilled its obligations. Does anybody except a Structural Linguist need to know that much? And what use is such plethora to a reader who wants to know how to pronounce a word? The new list of pronunciation symbols in 3 is slightly shorter than the one in 2 but also—perhaps for that reason—harder to understand. 2 uses only those nice old familiar letters of the alphabet, with signs over them to indicate long and short and so on. (It also repeats its pronunciation guide at the foot of each page, which is handy; 3 does not, to save space and dollars.) 3 also uses the alphabet, but there is one catastrophic exception. This is an upside-down “e,” known in the trade as a “schwa,” which stands for a faint, indistinct sound, like the “e” in quiet, that is unnervingly common and that can be either “a,” “e,” “i,” “o,” or “u,” according to circumstance. Things get quite lively when you trip over a schwa. Bird is given straight as bûrd in 2, but in 3 it is bərd, bə¯d, and bəid. This last may be boid, but I’m not sure. Schwa trouble. (“Double, double schwa and trouble.”—Shakespeare.)
I notice no important omissions in 3. Namby-pamby is in. However, it was coined—to describe the eighteenth-century Ambrose Philips’s insipid verses—not “by some satirists of his time” but by just one of them, Henry Carey, whose celebrated parody of Philips is entitled “Namby-Pamby.” Bromide is in (“a conventional and commonplace or tiresome person”), but not the fact that Gelett Burgess invented it. Still, he gets credit for blurb and goop. Abstract expressionism is in, but Tachism and action painting are not. The entries on Marxist and Freudian terms are skimpy. Id is in, but without citations and with too brief a definition. Ego is defined more as Fichte, Kant, and Hume used it than as Freud did. The distinction between unconscious and subconscious is muffed; the first is adequately defined and the reader is referred to