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By Root 1130 0

currencies under money and three and a half pages of dyes. It is also worth noting that Merriam-Webster added a new item to its line in 1943—the Webster’s Biographical Dictionary. While I quite understand the publishers’ reluctance to give away what their customers would otherwise have to buy separately, I do think the biographical dictionary should have been included—from the consumer’s point of view, at any rate.

However, the editors have sneaked in many proper names by the back door; that is, by entering their adjectival forms. Walpolian means “1: of, relating to, or having the characteristics of Horace Walpole or his writings,” and “2: of, relating to, or having the characteristics of Robert Walpole or his political policies,” and we get the death dates of both men (but not the birth dates), plus the information that Horace was “Eng. man of letters” and Robert “Eng. statesman” (though it is not noted that Horace was Robert’s son). This method of introducing proper names produces odd results. Raphael is in (Raphaelesque, Raphaelism, Raphaelite), as are Veronese (Veronese green) and Giotto and Giorgione and Michelangelo, but not Tintoretto and Piero della Francesca, because they had the wrong kind of names. Caravaggio had the right kind, but the editors missed him, though Caravaggesque is as frequently used in art criticism as Giottesque. All the great modern painters, from Cézanne on, are omitted, since none have appropriate adjectives. Yeats is in (Yeatsian) but not Eliot, Pound, or Frost (why not Frosty?). Sometimes one senses a certain desperation, as when Smithian is used to wedge in Adam Smith. Menckenian and Menckenese get an inch each, but there is no Hawthornean, no Melvillesque, no Twainite. All the twentieth-century presidents are in—Eisenhower by the skin of Eisenhower jacket—except Taft and Truman and Kennedy. Hoover has the most entries, all dispiriting: Hoover apron and Hooverize, because he was food administrator in the First World War; Hooverville, for the depression shanty towns; Hoovercrat, for a Southern Democrat who voted for him in 1928; and Hooverism.

This brings up the matter of capitalization. 2 capitalized proper names; 3 does not, with one exception. There may have been some esoteric reason of typographical consistency. Whatever their reasons, the result is that they must cumbersomely and forever add usu. cap. (Why usu. when it is alw.?) The exception is God, which even these cautious linguisticians couldn’t quite bring themselves to label usu. cap. Jesus is out because of adjectival deficiency, except for Jesus bug, a splendid slang term, new to me, for the waterbug (“fr. the allusion to his walking on water,” the “his” being firmly lower case). He does get in via His second name, which, luckily, has given us a rather important adjective, usu. cap.

At first glance, 3’s typography is cleaner and more harmonious. Dr. Gove estimates that the editors eliminated two million commas and periods (as after adj., n., and v.), or eighty pages’ worth. A second glance shows a major and, from a utilitarian point of view, very nearly a fatal defect. Words that have more than one meaning—and many have dozens—are much easier to follow in 2, which gives a new paragraph to each meaning, than in 3, which runs the whole entry as one superparagraph. (“What! Will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?”—Shakespeare.) Thus 2 not only starts each new meaning of cut with a paragraph but also puts in an italicized heading: Games & Sports, Bookbinding, Card Playing, Motion Pictures. In 3 one has to look through a solid paragraph of nine inches, and there are no headings. The most extreme example I found was 3’s entry on the transitive verb take, which runs on for a single paragraph two feet eight inches long, in which the twenty-one main meanings are divided only by boldfaced numerals; there follow, still in the same paragraph, four inches of the intransitive take, the only sign of this gearshifting being a tiny printer’s squiggle. Take is, admittedly, quite a verb. The Oxford English Dictionary gives sixty-three