American-English-Dictionary-Contemporary-Usage

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A
DICTIONARYOF
by
BERGEN EVANS
and
COR.NELIA EVANS
RANDOM HOUSE
NEW YORK
CONTEMPORARY
Fourteenth Printing
@Copyright, 1957, by Bergen Evans and Cornelia Evans
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions
Published in New York by Random House, Inc., and
simultaneously in Toronto, Canada by Random House
of Canada Limited.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 57-5379
Manufactured in the United States
of
America
PREFACE
When we speak or write we want to be
understood and respected. We want to con-
vey our meaning and we want to do it in a
way that will command admiration. To
accomplish these ends we must know the
meanings of words, their specific meanings
and their connotations, implications and
overtones, and we must know how to com-
bine words effectively into sentences.
A dictionary can help us to understand
the meaning of a word. But the only way
to understand a word fully is to see it in
use in as many contexts as possible. This
means that anyone who wants to improve
his vocabulary must read a great deal and
must make sure that he understands what
he reads. There is no short cut to this kind
of knowledge. If a man thinks that
noisome
and
noisy
are synonyms, if he uses focus
and nexlls interchangeably, if he sees no
difference between
refute
and
deny
and if
he assumes that
disinterested
means
unin-
terested,
he will not say what he means.
Indeed, he may even say the exact opposite
of what he means.
Respectable English is a much simpler
matter. It means the kind of English that
is used by the most respected people, the
sort of English that will make readers or
listeners regard you as an educated person.
Doubts about what is respectable English
and what is not usually involve quest:ions
of grammar. There are some grammatical
constructions, such as
that there dog
and
he ain’t come yet,
that are perfectly intelli-
gible but are not standard English. Such
expressions are used by people who are not
interested in “book learning.” They are not
used by educated people and hence are
regarded as
“incorrect” and serve as the
mark of a class. There is nothing wrong
about using them, but in a country such as
ours where for a generation almost every-
body has had at least a high school educa-
tion or its equivalent few people are willing
to use expressions that are not generally
approved as “correct.”
A man usually thinks about his work in
the language that his co-workers use. Turns
of speech that may have been natural to a
statistician when he was a boy on a farm
simply do not come to his mind when he is
talking about statistics. Anybody whose
work requires intellectual training-and
this includes everybody whose work in-
volves any amount of writing-speaks
standard English naturally and inevitably,
with possibly a few insignificant variations.
But many people who speak well write
ungrammatical sentences. There
seems
to
be some demon that numbs their fingers
when they take hold of a pen, a specter
called “grammar” which they know they
never understood in school and which rises
to fill them with paralyzing uncertainty
whenever they stop to think.
The only way to exorcise this demon is
to state some of the fundamental facts of
language. And one of the most fundamental
is that language changes constantly. People
living in the United States in the middle of
the twentieth century do not speak the
English of Chaucer or of Shakespeare.
They don’t even speak the English of
vi
PREFACE
Woodrow Wilson. The meanings of words
change and the ways in which words are
used in sentences change.
Silly
once meant
“holy,” fond meant “foolish,”
beam
meant
“tree” and
tree
meant “beam,” and so on
through many thousands of words. The
pronoun you could once be used with a
singular verb form, as in
Was you ever in
Baltimore?
Today we must say
were you.
The word news could once be used as a
plural, as
in These news were suddenly
spread throughout the city.
Today we must
treat it as a singular and say
This news was
spread.
Since language changes this much, no
one can say how a word “ought” to be
used. The best that anyone can do is to
say how it is being used, and this is what
a grammar should tell us. It should give us
information on what is currently accepted
as good English, bringing together as many
details as possible under a few general rules
or principles, so that it will be easier for us
to remember them.
The older grammars, by some one of
which almost every adult today was be-
wildered in his school days, were very full
of the spirit of what “ought” to be done
and drew the sanction of their “oughts”
from logic rather than from what people
actually said. Thus in such a sentence as
There is an apple and a pear in the basket
most school grammars up until a genera-
tion ago would have said that one “ought”
to use
are
and not is. And the schoolchil-
dren (some of whom later became school-
teachers) docilely accepted the pronounce-
ment. However the child would have heard
the minister, the doctor, and even the
schoolteacher out of school, say is, and
since he couldn’t bring himself to say that
the book was wrong in school or these
eminent people wrong out of school, he
would probably conclude that he didn’t
“understand” grammar. Unfortunate as that
conclusion might have been, it was at least
intelligent and preferable to attempting all
the rest of his life to speak and write in
the unreal manner recommended by the
textbook.
The first grammars published in English
were not intended to teach English but to
get a child ready for the study of Latin.
They were simplified Latin grammars with
English illustrations. Of course they were
incomprehensible, though they probably
made Latin easier when the child got to it.
Later, when Latin was no longer an im-
portant part of education, the schools con-
tinued to use books of this kind on the
theory that they taught “superior” English,
that is, English that resembled Latin.
But the rules of Latin grammar require
constructions that are absurd and affected
in English, totally unsubstantiated by Eng-
lish usage. And they often condemn con-
structions that the greatest writers of
English use freely. The common man, even
the common educated man, has had no
desire to be “superior” in some mysterious
way and these Latin rules have had very
little effect on the way English is actually
used by educated adults. But the rules have
had this effect, that millions of adults be-
lieve that what seems natural to them is
probably wrong.
In analyzing the language the old-fash-
ioned textbooks use concepts, or terms,
that are valid when applied to Latin but
are almost meaningless when applied to an
uninflected language such as modern Eng-
lish. The difference between a noun and an
adjective, or between an adjective and an
adverb, for example, is plain in Latin but
not in English. No grammar can explain
these differences in English without becom-
ing too involved for an elementary student.
Instead of explaining them, therefore, the
authors often write as if no explanation
were needed, as if the differences were
obvious to all but the dullest. And most of
us succumb to this. We get tired of feeling
stupid and decide, for instance, that an
adverb ends in
-ly,
such as
really,
and an
adjective doesn’t, such as real. This leads us
to feel uneasy at Swing
low, sweet chariot,
to wonder how road commissioners can be
so illiterate as to urge
us
to
drive
slow, and
to get all hot and bothered in fifty useless
ways. The child who leaves school knowing
PREFACE
that he doesn’t know the ditierence between
an adjective and an adverb is unusualIy
strong minded and lucky.
For the last fifty years, however, certain
grammarians have been making a scientific
study of English. They have been finding
out how English is really used by different
groups of people,
instead of theorizing
about how it might be used or dogmatizing
about how it ought to be used. The investi-
gations of these men have shown us which
grammatical forms are used by educated
people and which are not. They make it
possible to define and analyze what is
standard speech and what is not.
They show us that standard English
allows a certain amount of variation. That
is, there is often more than one acceptable
way of using the same words. The most
obvious variations are geographical, Some
words are used differently in different parts
of the country, but each use is respectable
in its own locality. Some variations are
peculiar to a trade or profession (such as
the medical use of indicate). These are as
respectable as the group that uses them but
they are likely to be unintelligible to the
general public. When they are used solely
to mark a difference, to give an esoteric
flavor, they constitute a jargon.
There are also differences between for-
mal and informal English. Formal English
is solemn and precise. It dots all the i’s
and crosses all the t’s. Informal or collo-
quial English is more sprightly and leaves
more to the imagination. Forty years ago
it was considered courteous to use formal
English in speaking to strangers, implying
they were solemn and important people.
Today it is considered more flattering to
address strangers as if they were one’s in-
timate friends. This is a polite lie, of
course; but it is today’s good manners.
Modern usage encourages informality wher-
ever possible and reserves formality for
very few occasions.
This dictionary is intended as a reference
book on current English in the United
States. It is designed for people who speak
standard English but are uncertain about
some details. lr attempts to list the que-s-
tions that most people ask, or should ask,
about what is now good practice and to
give the best answers available. It also con-
tains a full discussion of English grammar,
a discussion which does not assume that
the student can already read and write
Latin.
If any reader wants to make a systematic
study of English grammar he should begin
with
the
entry
parts
of
speech
and follow
through alI the cross references. Some of
these may prove difficult, but no one needs
to study it who is not interested. One can
use good English without understanding the
principles behind it just as one can drive
a car without understanding mechanics.
The individual word entries do not as-
sume that the reader is interested in gram-
matical principles. They assume that he
wants the answer to a specific question in
the least possible time. The information in
them has been drawn chiefly from the Ox-
ford English Dictionary,
the seven-volume
English grammar of Otto Jespersen, and
the works of Charles Fries. This has been
supplemented by information from A
Dic-
tionary
of
American English,
edited by Sir
William Craigie and James Hulbert,
A Dic-
tionary of Americanisms,
by Mitford M.
Mathews,
The American Language,
with
its two supplements, by H. L. Mencken,
and
The American College Dictionary.
Fur-
ther information has been drawn from ar-
ticles appearing
in American Speech
over
the past twenty years and from the writings
of George 0. Curme, John Lesslie Hall,
Robert A. Hall, Jr., Sterling A. Leonard,
Albert H. Marckwardt, Robert C. Pooley,
Thomas Pyles, and others. Some of the
statements concerning differences in British
and American usage are based on the writ-
ings of H. W. Fowler, Eric Partridge, Sir
Alan Herbert, Ivor Brown, Sir Ernest Gow-
ers and H. W. Horwih.
The authors want to thank George ElIi-
son, Sarah Bekker, Bernice Levin, Irene Le
Compte and James K. Robinson for help
in assembling and organizing this material.
They also want to thank Esther Sheldon for
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