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By Root 1043 0

the latter; looking that up, he finds “The mental activities just below the threshold of consciousness; also: the aspect of the mind concerned with such activities that is an entity or a part of the mental apparatus overlapping, equivalent to, or distinct from the unconscious.” I can’t grasp the nature of something that is overlapping, equivalent to, or distinct from something else. While dialectical materialism and charisma (which 2 treats only as a theological term, although Max Weber had made the word common sociological currency long before 1934) are in, there is no mass culture, and the full entry for the noun masses is “pl. of mass.” There is no reference to Marx or even to Hegel under reify, and under alienation the closest 3 comes to this important concept of Marxist theory is “the state of being alienated or diverted from normal function,” which is illustrated by “alienation of muscle.” Marx is not mentioned in the very brief definition of class struggle.

The definitions seem admirably objective. I detected only one major lapse:

McCarthyism—a political attitude of the mid-twentieth century closely allied to know-nothingism and characterized chiefly by opposition to elements held to be subversive and by the use of tactics involving personal attacks on individuals by means of widely publicized indiscriminate allegations esp. on the basis of unsubstantiated charges.

I fancy the formulator of this permitted himself a small, dry smile as he leaned back from his typewriter before trudging on to McClellan saddle and McCoy (the real). I’m not complaining, but I can’t help remembering that the eponymous hero of McCarthyism wrote a little book with that title in which he gave a rather different definition. The tendentious treatment of McCarthyism contrasts with the objectivity of the definition of Stalinism, which some of us consider an even more reprehensible ism: “The political, economic and social principles and policies associated with Stalin; esp: the theory and practice of communism developed by Stalin from Marxism-Leninism.” The first part seems to me inadequate and the second absurd, since Stalin never had a theory in his life. The definitions of Democratic and Republican seem fair: “policies of broad social reform and internationalism in foreign affairs” v. “usu. associated with business, financial, and some agricultural interests and with favoring a restricted governmental role in social and economic life.” Though I wonder what the Republican National Committee thinks.

One of the most painful decisions unabridgers face is what to do about those obscene words that used to be wholly confined to informal discourse but that of late, after a series of favorable court decisions, have been cropping up in respectable print. The editors of 2, being gentlemen and scholars, simply omitted them. The editors of 3, being scientists, were more conscientious. All the chief four- and five-letter words are here, with the exception of the most important one. They defend this omission not on lexical grounds but on the practical and, I think, reasonable ground that the word is so charged with horror—there is no question which one it is—that its inclusion would have stimulated denunciations and boycotts. There are, after all, almost half a million other words in their dictionary—not to mention an investment of three and a half million dollars—and they reluctantly decided not to imperil the whole enterprise by insisting on That Word.

Two useful features of 2 were omitted from 3: the gazetteer of place names and the biographical dictionary. They were left out partly to save money—they took up 176 pages, and the biographical dictionary had to be brought up to date with each new printing—and partly because Dr. Gove and his colleagues, more severe than the easygoing editors of 2, considered such items “encyclopedic material” and so not pertinent to a dictionary. The force of this second excuse is weakened because although they did omit such encyclopedic features of 2 as the two pages on grasses, they put in a page-and-a-half table of