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By LESLIE HANSCOM
(C) 1973, Newsday
Nobody who cares for the
English language and who has
kept his ears open in the last 10
vears is going to pick up ‘The
Barnhart Dictionary of New
English Since 1963'’ (Harper &
Row, $12 95) in the hope of
cheering himself up
The listener who pays at
tention knows already that what
is new in the language seems to
reduce it in scope instead of the
other way around
People are talking more and
using language less, as they
parrot whatever cliche is current
on television this week or
surrender to the rote dialect of
the youth culture, a lingo that is
virtually useless for expressing
human thought. Any dictionary
that reflects the way things are
going is bound to make
dispiriting reading, and this one
does
For one thing, the number of
words that have actually been
newly minted since 1963 does not,
as reported here, seem very
extensive. The three editors of
the dictionary—Clarence and
Robert Barnhart and Sol
Steinmetz—are able to make a
512 page book out of it because, to
a very great degree, they are
listing old words in new uses
Adjectives have become nouns
(••ambivalent. N. A bi-sexual
person”), nouns have turned into
verbs < “bar mitzvah. to confirm
a 13-year-old boy in a
synagogue”)
There are words that have
appeared since 1963 which were
clearly never intended to fit in a
human mouth. I would cite the
very “dysfunction” as a fair
example. It means “to break
down.” and the normal instinct of
flesh-and-blood jaws is to say
that But these days the way to
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inspire confidence in your ability
to fit into the system is to suggest
by your style of speech that if
somebody cut you open he would
find nothing but a transistor
hookup Therefore “dysfunction”
is a status word.
It isn't the worst one. Until I
read the Barnhart dictionary, I
didn't know anybody could be
depraved enough to invent a word
like “disambiguate” and I was
happier for my ignorance. It
means, by a great stroke of irony,
"'o clear up," and I gather that it
has its origin directly in com
puter science, which is no sur
prise at all. Spoken by a com
puter it would probably sound
entirely appropriate, but I
predict you will soon hear it used
by human beings and wish to God
your native language was Finnish
Some of the words that
technocracy and bureaucracy
have wished on us are offensive
only for that metallic ring on the
ear and their way of conveying
that the speaker is an institution
rather than a man or a woman.
But there are others that one
loves to hate for their built-in
hypocrisy.
Take the word “dehire.” Would
it make you feel better, on being
thrown out of your job, to know
that you were “dehired" rather
than fired0
Or when it comes to really
intolerable avoidance of the
issue, consider the undertaker’s
neologism "cremains,” meaning
funeral ashes. Anybody who
would use that word ought to be
chucked into the furnace the
ashes came from.
Then there are those slightly
more endurable (because
pathetic) though no less foolish
words coined by doers of menial
work to dignify their trades Two
given in the new dictionary are
“hairtician” for the barber and
“garbologist” for the man who
hauls off your potato peelings
Some of the new words are
depressing, also, not for their
intrinsic lack of appeal, but for
the dismaying period of history
that they mirror It took a
decade like the last one to create
a need for a word like
"magnicide." the assassination
of somebody big. to make the
murderer feel important
Even in colorful slang,
however, the past decade has
been uninventive, and this
together with the spreading
blight of bureaucratese suggests
that the language of Shakespeare
isn't going anywhere and maybe
we aren’t either.
Max Beerbohm once laid
down the law that, if words lose
their individual weight and
precision, then thought becomes
imprecise also and morality next.
If you recall the language of the
Watergate witnesses—a
prefabricated idiom intended for
mimeographed directives rather
than for the expression of an
individual man's thoughts and
feelings—you are apt to think Sir
Max wasn't talking through his
straw boater. Which is another
reason for finding this dictionary
of flat and inexact speech a
depressing document. J
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