Mind your language
THOSE publicity-seeking fellows from Oxford have sent me the new edition of The Concise Oxford Dictionary to read. I am pleased to note that it is edited by a woman.
I haven't quite finished it yet, but I have read enough to find that in its effort to be concise it sometimes becomes obscure. But it does give exam- ples of usage (e.g. 'more problems than last time'; 'bring some more water'). Still, I suppose most of us use a dictio- nary not to find out the way to use more but to check spelling, or, the more idle of us, to discover etymologies. (Did you know that mortise comes via French from the Arabic murtazz, 'fixed in'? I didn't.) And at 115 for two million words of text the Concise is not a bad buy, though I still have a soft spot for Chambers among one-volume dictionar- ies. I am always throwing it at Veronica when she asks me how to spell a word.
The Oxford people are crowing about all the new words they have put in this new edition, but to me these brand-new words too often reflect the new horrors of what I once heard a preacher uniron- ically refer to as 'the so-called 20th cen- tury'. Take gangsta (from gangster) and ragga (from ragamuffin) — they are both kinds of booming music that Sir Paul Condon must be only too annoyed to hear blasting from the open windows of cars parked outside his bedroom win- dow. That, I suppose, is at least a lesser offence than ram-raiding, where a motor-car is used to smash a shop win- dow, perhaps to steal a machine for watching breakfast television, which might be showing footage of bored chil- dren on housing estates hotting danger- ously in stolen cars.
My husband, of course, is equally annoyed by ME, RSI, birthing pool, glue ear and fundholding. Veronica's pet hates are Balti (a supposedly more authentic kind of curry) and decaf, which she says, with some justification, defeats the whole purpose of coffee.
I shall take a petit noir or espresso while I ponder the Concise's guidance on usage, not of coffee, but of words such as Hottentot.
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