Franke: The Huge Dictionary in the Corner
by Mark Franke
One important rule of writing, one I too often break, is to choose words carefully with the intended audience in mind. For example, don’t use a lot of technical jargon if you are not writing for a technical audience. The same goes for using college-level words if your readers do not hold college degrees.
A good friend, a self-appointed critic of my op-ed columns, lets me know if I use too many big words that cause him to consult a dictionary to figure out what I am saying. I’m sure this has nothing to do with the fact he is a liberal and I am a conservative; he surely wouldn’t judge my vocabulary by an ideological standard.
His complaint about having to go to the dictionary to understand what I have written reminds me of one of the most irritating things about my grammar-school education. A student asks the teacher how to spell a word and the teacher tells the student to “look it up in the dictionary.” How? The student doesn’t know how to spell it and dictionaries are arranged alphabetically. Get the first several letters wrong and good luck finding your word.
Before I go on a rant about unreasonable teachers, I need to remember that my wife is a retired English teacher. Language arts she calls her favorite subject. It seems to me that, given all the grammar, spelling and pronunciation rules, it ought to be called language sciences, but I am just being argumentative.
Seriously, dictionaries have always fascinated me. It probably goes back to that huge dictionary in my grade school classroom that was on a stand in the corner. Every time I went over to it to look up that word I didn’t know how to spell, I would get distracted reading the definitions of other words on the page. It’s a good thing I didn’t know at the time that according to an NPR report the word “run” has 645 different meanings or I would still be standing in front of that dictionary turned to the Rs.
Ever since I was sprung from the incarceration called mandatory school attendance, my favorite dictionary is the Oxford English Dictionary, the OED. The additional information it gives for each word is absolutely intriguing. One can learn the history of the word, when it came into usage in the English language and whence its antecedents. It’s not just terse definitions; it is whole essays for words we assume have always been there.
The history behind the OED is interesting in itself. An author I enjoy reading is Simon Winchester. One of his books, “The Professor and the Madman,” is about the origination of the OED. Many of the original entries were furnished to the editorial team by a scholar who was sentenced to a psychiatric hospital for murder. The book is great but I suggest giving the movie a pass.
The OED contains 273,000 head words, the basic entry in the dictionary. By the time one counts all the derivatives and combinations, the number of entries exceeds 600,000. Think about your teacher using the OED for your weekly vocabulary test.
I should admit to doing quite well on those vocabulary tests back in the day. Credit it to all the time I spent standing at that huge dictionary in the corner or just to a well-trained memory. The problem these days is the continued deterioration manifesting itself in that memory.
I don’t think I could even pass those grade-school vocabulary tests today, let alone ace them. The problem seems to be in the recall function of memory, not the recognition function. I know what a word means when I see it but it is an even chance of my recalling a specific word when I am trying to use it.
Perhaps that is what my friend is trying to tell me. If I can’t think of the word I want, then I shouldn’t be using it. That may be good advice, but sometimes there is that one perfect word that gets the meaning across. If that causes my friend to go to his dictionary, so be it.
But there is hope for school children and my critical friend. According to Wikipedia, the 25 most common words in the English language make up about one-third of printed material. Increase the word count to 100 and you have half of printed English. I realize this includes all the common prepositions, articles and conjunctions that do yeoman’s work in every sentence but there are only a few handfuls of them.
Perhaps I should make a New Year’s resolution to restrict my writing to those 100 most common words. Given the rate my memory cells are going AWOL, that might be a good idea.
Mark Franke, M.B.A., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review and its book reviewer, is formerly an associate vice-chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.
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