Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [108]
The objection is not to recording the facts of actual usage. It is to failing to give the information that would enable the reader to decide which usage he wants to adopt. If he prefers to use deprecate and depreciate interchangeably, no dictionary can prevent him, but at least he should be warned. Thus 3 has under transpire—“4: to come to pass; happen, occur.” 2 has the same entry, but it is followed by a monitory pointing hand: “transpire in this sense has been disapproved by most authorities on usage, although the meaning occurs in the writings of many authors of good standing.” Fair enough.[3] I also prefer 2’s handling of the common misuse of infer to mean imply—“5: loosely and erroneously, to imply.” 3 sounds no warning, and twice under infer it advises “compare imply.” Similarly, 2 labels the conjunctive like “illiterate” and “incorrect,” which it is, adding that “in the works of careful writers [it] is replaced by as.” 3 accepts it as standard, giving such unprepossessing citations as “impromptu programs where they ask questions much like I do on the air—Art Linkletter” and “wore his clothes like he was...afraid of getting dirt on them—St. Petersburg (Fla.) Independent.” Enthuse is labeled colloq. in 2 but not in 3. It still sounds colloq. if not godawf. to me, nor am I impressed by 3’s citations, from writers named L.G. Pine and Lawrence Constable and from a trade paper called Fashion Accessories. Or consider the common misuse of too when very is meant, as “I was not too interested in the lecture.” 2 gives this use but labels it colloq. 3 gives it straight and cites Irving Kolodin: “an episodic work without too consistent a texture;” Mr. Kolodin probably means “without a very consistent texture,” but how does one know he doesn’t mean “without an excessively consistent [or monotonous] texture”? In music criticism such ambiguities are not too helpful.
In dealing with words that might be considered slang, 2 uses the label wherever there is doubt, while 3 leans the other way. The first procedure seems to me more sensible, since no great harm is done if a word is labeled slang until its pretensions to being standard have been thoroughly tested (as long as it is admitted into the dictionary), while damage may be done if it is prematurely accepted as standard. Thus both 2 and 3 list such women’s-magazine locutions as galore, scads, scrumptious, and too-too, but only 2 labels them slang. (Fowler’s note on galore applies to them all: “Chiefly resorted to by those who are reduced to relieving the dullness of matter by oddity of expression.”) Thus rummy, spang (in the middle of), and nobby are in both, but only 2 calls them slang.
Admittedly, the question is most difficult. Many words begin as slang and then rise in the world. Some slang words have survived for centuries without bettering themselves, like the Jukes and the Kallikaks. Dukes (fists) and duds (clothes) are still slang, although they go back to the eighteenth and the sixteenth century, respectively.
The definition of slang in 3 is “characterized primarily by connotations of extreme informality...coinages or arbitrarily changed words, clipped or shortened forms, extravagant, forced, or facetious figures of speech or verbal novelties usu. experiencing quick popularity and relatively rapid decline into disuse.” A good definition (Dr. Gove has added that slang is “linguistically self-conscious”), but it seems to have been forgotten in making up 3, most of whose discriminations about slang strike me as arbitrary. According to 3, scram is not slang, but vamoose is. “Goof 1” (“to make a mistake or blunder”) is not slang, but “goof 2” (“to spend time idly or foolishly”) is. “Floozy 1” (“an attractive young woman of loose morals”) is standard, but “floozy 2” (“a dissolute and sometimes slovenly woman”) is slang. Can even a Structural Linguist make such fine distinctions about such a word? The many synonyms for drunk raise the same question. Why are oiled, pickled, and boiled labelled slang if soused and spiflicated are not? Perhaps cooking terms for drunk are automatically