Dictionary of Contemporary English Usage.pdf

DICTIONARYOF

by BERGEN EVANS

and COR.NELIA EVANS

RANDOM HOUSE NEW YORK

CONTEMPORARY

Fourteenth Printing

@Copyright, 1957, by Bergen Evans and Cornelia Evans

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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