Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [105]
A second glance also suggests second thoughts about the richness of citations in 3. Often it seems plethoric, even otiose (“lacking use or effect”). The chief reason 3’s entries on multiple-meaning words are so much longer than 2’s is that it has so many more citations. The promotional material for 3 mentions the treatment of freeze as an improvement, but does anybody really need such illustrative richness as:
6a: to make (as the face) expressionless [with instructions to recognize no one; and in fact he did freeze his face up when an old acquaintance hailed him—Fletcher Pratt] [a look of incredulity froze his face...and his eyes went blank with surprise—Hamilton Basso] b. to preserve rigidly a particular expression on [he still sat, his face frozen in shame and misery—Agnes S. Turnbull]
The question is rhetorical.
One of the problems of an unabridger is where completeness ends and madness begins. The compilers of 2 had a weakness for such fabrications as philomuse, philomythia (“devotion to legends...sometimes, loquaciousness”), philonoist (“a seeker of knowledge”), philophilosophos (“partial to philosophers”), philopolemic, philopornist “a lover of harlots”), and philosopheress (which means not only a woman philosopher, like Hannah Arendt, but a philosopher’s wife, like Xantippe). These are omitted by the compilers of 3, though they could not resist philosophastering (“philosophizing in a shallow or pretentious manner”). But why do we need nooky (“full of nooks”) or name-caller (“one that habitually engages in name-calling”) or all those “night” words, from night clothes—“garments worn in bed”—through nightdress, nightgear, nightgown, nightrobe, nightshirt, and nightwear? What need of sea boat (“a boat adapted to the open sea”) or sea captain or swimming pool (“a pool suitable for swimming,” lest we imagine it is a pool that swims) or sunbath (“exposure to sunlight”—“or to a sun lamp,” they add cautiously) or sunbather (“one that takes sunbaths”)? Why kittenless (“having no kitten”)? Why need we be told that whitefaced is “having the face white in whole or in part”? Or that whitehanded is “having white hands”? (They missed whitelipped.)
Then there are those terrible negative prefixes, which the unwary unabridger gets started on and slides down with sickening momentum. 3 has left out many of 2’s absurdities: nonborrower, nonnervous, non-Mohammedan, non-Welsh, non-walking. But it adds some of its own: nonscientist, nonphilatelic, non-inbred, nondrying (why no nonwetting?), nonbank (“not being or done by a bank”), and many other nonuseful and nonsensical entries. It has thirty-four pages of words beginning with un-, and while it may seem carping to object to this abundance, since the O.E.D. has 380 such pages, I think, given the difference in purpose, that many may be challenged. A reasonably bright child of ten will not have to run to Daddy’s Unabridged to find the meaning of unreelable (“incapable of being wound on a reel”), unlustrous (“lacking luster”), or unpowdered (“not powdered”). And if it’s for unreasonably dumb children, why omit unspinnable, unshinning, and unsanded?
For a minor example of gnostomania, or scholar’s knee, see the treatment of numbers. Every number from one to ninety-nine is entered and defined, also every numerical adjective. Thus when the reader hits sixty he goes into a skid fifteen inches long. Sixty (“being one more than 59 in number”) is followed by the pronoun (“60 countable persons or things not specified but under consideration and being enumerated”) and the noun (“six tens: twice 30: 12 fives,” etc.). Then comes sixty-eight (“being one more than 67 in number”) and sixty-eighth (“being number 68 in a countable series”), followed by sixty-fifth, sixty-first, and so on. The compilers of 2 dealt with the sixty problem in a mere two entries totalling an inch and a half. But the art of lexicography has mutated into a “science” since then. (“Quotation mark...sometimes