Parent afid Child
HERE is a fine selection—(I had all but said anthology, but the sight of these two stalwart volumes of some 1,300 pages each, and weighing together, I should guess, about twelve pounds, repels this light and flowery word)—from the most interesting book in the world, the Oxford English Dictionary, which contains nearly half a million words and more than one and a half million quotations. (It is Mr. Onions who has counted, not 1.) We are not informed how many words or quotations there are in the abridgement, only that it is a quintessence, and here one suspects a iouble meaning. for there would seem, calculating from an average page, to be some hundred thousand words, or about a fifth part of the other. The proportion of quotations is probably considerably less, for many words in the Shorter Dictionary have none, and in each case they are inevitably and drastically pruned. But enough remain to preserve the lively literary flavour, to elucidate, and• to instruct, though not, I think, quite enough to dispel occasional confusion.
The Shorter has one actual superiority over its parent, for It has a list of the authors cited, though not (as a rule) of the titles of the books quoted from. The large Dictionary has not yet printed such a list ; it is hoped that it will do so in the supplementary volumes, so that those unlettered readers who do not recognize such brief allusions as "Holland Amm. Marcel." may be able to enlighten their darkness. On the other hand, the list in the Shorter, by only giving, for the most part, the authors, with dates of birth and death, leaves obscure the date of any particular quotation. Take, for instance, farthingale. We learn that it was first mentioned in 1552, and the one quotation is signed Ray. Referring to Ray in the list, you find that he was born in 1627 and died in 1705, but no books by him are mentioned, and you are in the dark as to whether he wrote of farthingales in his Catalogue of English Plants, his Collection of Proverls, his History of Fishes, of Quad- rupeds, or of Serpents, his Journey through the Low Countries, or his Persuasive to a Holy Life ; in short, it might have been any year between 1660 and 1700. The large Dictionary annotates the quotation, "Ray, Journ. Low. C. 1673," so you know where you are. Would it not be worth the extra space for the Shorter to do likewise ? On the other hand, one must not complain of the exclusion of the other farthingale quotations, even of Hugh Latimer's sardonic, "I warrant you they had bracelets and verdingales and such fine gere," considering the really staggering amount which has been packed into the available space.
The dates of included words run from Alfred to the present day, but tLos which deceased before 1400 are rightly excluded. Rightly, since they have not, for most of us, the literary associations of their later brethren. I can, for instance, do without wi and speow and those other Old Englishisins to which we decided six centuries ago to give the frozen mitt (I use this expression with some qualms, since the Dictionary ignores it). Among the obsolete words which, fell asleep later than this date, it must have been a difficult task to choose. One misses here many familiar dead friends, endeared by the melodious cadences or witty turns of phrase of those makers of English prose and poetry who were wont to use them. Perhaps frequency of use was the guiding principle of choice, both as to words and their various senses. There are here no "hoyting girls," nor yet young ladies who "coyly quaint it with dissembling face," nor even does God "quaint not with Baal," this verb: being omitted, in all its meanings. There are no" doting-nid.ots," no pranky dandiprats (dandiprat is here, but not in its indulgent sense of male or female urchin, as in Heywood's "With this dandiprat, this pretty little Apes face, is yon blunt fellow in love ") ; there are no " boutgates and deceits in the heart of man," no rooksters to tradition us to our stroy, no. . . . But this is to be un- grateful.
It is perhaps a fairer cause of complaint that the excellent Principle of assigning to each sense of a word its first known date has not quite always been adhered to. The verb to ledge, for instance, has only one first date (1573) given for four of its senses. The last date found of each sense is, how- ever, given. The senses are usually given chronologically, but not invariably. In the word foggy, for instance, the earliest sense, which is bloated or fat (" all foggy fat she was," Skelton, 1529), is placed third, with no indication that the 1529 use of the word was in this sense.
There are many new words here which have invaded the language since the O.E.D. was a-compiling. But some of them must have reached us since even the Shorter composed its earliest pages, for I do not find, for example, the verb to doll up, of which I have for several years hoped to learn the birthday. And it is strange in these days to find a cloister to which gangsters have not penetrated, in which the name gun is never applied to a pistol, and gunman is dis- missed as "now rare." The groves of Academe have not yet, it seems, been disturbed by transatlantic roysterings. Nor by such vilely illiterate but all too common usages as due for " owing to" (" it skidded due to the speed ") and following for " after " (" following supper, they went to bed"). And what of the booksellers' use of title for book ? How soon do these common journalistic vulgarisms establish themselves as uses ? On the other hand, words coined in the European war, such as Nighty and others seldom heard now, are well represented, and so are technical and scientific terms.
I do not know (for I have not yet read it all) whether the .Shorter Dictionary amends any of its parent's few errors and omissions. But I see that it repeats that the first use of Augustan, applied to the Queen Anne writers, was in 1819, still ignoring Goldsmith's essay in The Bee of November 24th, 1759. Elizabethan, again, is given as an adjective in 1817, whereas Isaac Disraeli used it in 1807, and its first use as a noun is ascribed to 1881, which is certainly far too kite, for Masson uses it in 1859, with no air of coining a word. Indeed, he boldly, and without giving proofs, states that by 1624 a cluster of writers had already been named " the Elizabethans." This is interesting in so careful a professor, and it is a pity he cannot now be questioned. But 1881 should certainly be amended.
But success in the engrossing game of trying to catch the O.E.D. out is rare, and it is perhaps impudent to play it. Better to give thanks both for that mighty work and for this its sturdy child, the second-best 'dictionary, both etymologically and otherwise, in England.
Rosn MACAULAY.
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