Vol. 9 No. 5 · 5 March 1987
pages 22-23 | 3450 words
Uncomplimentary Words for an Old Man
Walter Nash
- The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology edited by T.F. Hoad
Oxford, 552 pp, £12.95, May 1986, ISBN 0 19 861182 X
- Dictionary of Changes in Meaning by Adrian Room
Routledge, 292 pp, £14.95, May 1986, ISBN 0 7102 0341 1
- The Story of English by Robert McCrum, William Cran and Robert McNeil
Faber/BBC, 384 pp, £14.95, September 1986, ISBN 0 563 20247 5
- Dictionary of American Regional English. Vol. I: Introduction and A-C edited by Frederic Cassidy
Harvard, 903 pp, $60.00, July 1985, ISBN 0 674 20511 1
Thomas Hardy once told Robert Graves how he had gone to the Oxford English Dictionary to confirm the existence of a dialect word he proposed to use in a poem, and came to a standstill because the only authority quoted for it was his own Under the Greenwood Tree. This is an acute case of our dependence on dictionaries, and illustrates the commonest reason for resorting to them. What do you look for in a dictionary, after all? Lucid definitions? The citations that examplify usage? Etymologies? Spellings? Or do you, like Hardy, simply seek assurance that the word exists? I strongly suspect that the warrant of the lexicon is one of the writer’s deep securities; no one feels really confident about using an unattested word.
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Letters
Vol. 9 No. 9 · 7 May 1987
From Adrian Room
SIR: I am grateful to Walter Nash for his thoughtful and positive review (LRB, 5 March) of my Dictionary of Changes in Meaning. He gently chides me, however, for omitting child (which formerly could mean ‘girl’) and let (in the sense ‘prevent’, ‘obstruct’). May I justify these apparent omissions? As Walter Nash points out, child indeed occurs in The Winter’s Tale in the sense ‘girl’ (‘A boy or a child, I wonder?’). The speaker, however, is an illterate shepherd (who admits in the next sentence ‘I am not bookish’), and Shakespeare was thus using the word in a dialect sense. (A few lines earlier in the same play, he uses child in its standard sense of ‘infant’, in the stage direction ‘Laying down Child’.) My aim was to record changes in meaning in mainstream English, not dialect and specialised usages deviating from standard English, which are many and varied, after all. That is why, for example, I also omitted gay, because its sense of ‘homosexual’ is a jargonistic one. The word has not replaced ‘homosexual’, nor has it (quite) lost its standard sense of ‘merry’. As for let this word has surely never changed its original meaning of ‘prevent’, and although now really an archaism, still survives in this sense in the noun let that is a serve in tennis or squash that has to be played again. So no change in meaning here to record! But I do take Mr Nash’s point about wardrobe, and am grateful to him for noting my literary oversight here.
Incidentally, Barbara Everett, in her letter in the same issue, perpetrates a false etymology when she supposes that ‘woman’ is ‘linguistically a derivative’ of ‘man’. It is not, at least not of ‘man’ meaning ‘adult male’. It comes from Old English wifman, whose two components mean literally ‘woman human’. See my Dictionary of True Etymologies.
Adrian Room
Petersfield, Hampshire
