Postscript . . •
By CYRIL RAY
Ir was a summer's evening in one of those smart Thames- valley restaurants. Between courses, the couple at the table in the window could look out on to the satin surface of the water and the silhouetted trees darkening against the blue- green evening sky. I could see from my own table that they were eating lobster and drinking hock, and I hoped that the wine was a good one, for he was handsome and she was pretty and both were elegantly dressed. I wasn't near enough to see the label on the bottle, but I did manage to catch just one of their remarks, as a voice was raised : 'But I wasn't drunk, I tell you,' said the handsome man, 'I'd simply had a drink or two.'
A man who could afford lobster and hock in a riverine restaurant ought to have been able to do better than that : a mere thirty shillings—less than the cost of that bottle, I haven't a doubt— spent on the slap-up, revised and modernised Roget's Thesaurus that Longmans have just brought out would have enabled him to find much it's exactly as I imagined it.'
more telling comparisons than between being drunk and having had a drink. He could have denied being any of thirty-seven variations on the theme of boozed-up and nicely, thank you, and admitted to having been merely moozy or woozy; oiled or boiled; fuddled or muddled; glassy-eyed, pie-eyed, or gravy-eyed. There's more than a page of the new Roget devoted to 949 DrunkennesS, and less than half a page to 948 Sobriety and even that has to be made up with such proper names—such extremely proper names—as Good Templar, Rechabite, Band of Hope, Blue Ribbon Army and Temperance League (a list that ends incidentally with the one word, `cooper'). Whereas the antonyms range from ebriosity, temulence, crapulousness and titubancy to grog blossoms, pink elephants and cirrhosis of the liver. The more 1 read my Roget, the more I feel that that man didn't deserve a pretty girl to talk to over a bottle of hock.
Not that 1 agree with every refinement of mean- ing in Roget : I wouldn't have considered 'merry,' `gay,' and 'happy' as synonyms for 'drunk,' if under merely 'tipsy' one is going to find, 'fried, frazzled, raddled, corned, potted, canned, housed, whittled, screwed, honked, ploughed and smashed,' to say nothing of `stupefied.' And yet, on the other hand, I cannot go all the way with' the admirable Reader Over Your Shoulder, newlY reissued as a paperback (Mayflower, 3s. 6d.), in which Robert Graves and Alan Hodges insist that 'All professional writers (and every other writer who can afford it) should possess or have ready access to the big Oxford English Diction- ary,' whereas, they say disparagingly, 'most of
. them are content to rub along with a Thesaurus.
There are thirteen volumes to the big 0E0 which is rather a lot to have to take to a riverside restaurant for the purpose of conducting a con- versation with a young woman, and even if the young man had made do with the two-volume Shorter Oxford, he wouldn't have got any more out of it than to be able to say, 'But I wasn't drunk, I tell you: I was overcome by or as by alcoholic liquor; intoxicated,' which is what I take it the girl had been going on about, anywaY. All he could have added would have been: 'Alsd fig. t2. Drenched; soaked with moisture-1697; and I always find it so difficult myself, and I am sure he would have done, too, to get italics across (to say nothing of that obelus) in spoken English, especially with one's mouth full of hock and lobster.
No, Roget's the thing, and all in one volume, too, which is a great relief to one who's been making do for years with the Everyman edition --where the index is in Vol. 11, and you always pick up Vol. I to follow up a reference before discovering that the word you're after is in the few pages of synonyms and antonyms in Vol. It after all. And I have a fellow feeling, anyway, for Mr. Robert Dutch, OBE, sometime senior scholar of Christ's College, Cambridge, the reviser and moderniser of this admirable new edition, 0, puts 'leftish,' which is me, under the general
couldn't have put it better myself 'peaceful,
heading of 177 Moderation along with and puts 'reactionary,' which is the other fetid:: under the general heading of 603 Tergiverisatio along with 'double dealing,"hypocritical,' 'girt pery,"supple,"versatile' and 'treacherous.: without Roget. _not, that
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