Ambivalence
SIR.—Mr. Rossiter certainly " sees pedantry where none is meant." I wasn't being pedantic about " ambivalent." Pedantry requires more learning than I have. I thought it odd to call Thackeray " ambivalent." To me, it was a learned word, and I wanted to be quite sure what it meant. That Mr. Rossiter had been " accused of planting the term on Cambridge," I had no idea. This odd, learned, pedantic word sent me to the dictionary. In respect of one of our great dictionaries, I was
out of date. I keen always at hand Webster's New International Dictionary. But Mr. Minstede is quite right. I did not know that it had gone into a second edition in 1934. The new edition would have told me all about " ambivalent." Our Oxford dictionaries were made before the word had become a byword in Cambridge.—Your obedient
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