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...tail" (or y) at the end of the word denotes monkey to children. Soon children were asked to recognize the "two little eyes" in moon-with logical results. Since letters meant nothing, moon turned into boon, loon or soon. Now, say critics. U.S. children are mired in a whole lexicon of reading errors-bolt for blot, bouquet for banquet, cottage for college, and scores of others...
...eliminate all words obsolete before 1740. The damage done to the study of Tudor and Stuart literature is not easily calculated. Such a policy destroys any claims to scholarship Webster's might make. No matter how many experts and Ph.D's spent their time writing definitions for this new lexicon, the fact still remains that 250,000 words are "out of print," and they are just the sort of words that scholars have interest...
...lexicon of the dust jacket, writers do not write novels any more; they write major novels. The phrase, once the reviewer's last cymbal crash before his closing chord of adjectives, has become a generic tag, like "short story" and "hot dog." Thus cold frankfurters are cold hot dogs, not cold dogs. Accepting the publishers' ploy, critics must now confront a new literary phenomenon: the insignificant major novel...
That Old Sprachgefühl. The result may pain purists, who will even find four-letter words ("usu. considered vulgar") in the new lexicon. They appear now because the most cultured (urbane, polished) Americans are used to earthier speech in fiction and drama. According to Merriam-Webster, even ain't is "used orally in most parts of the U.S. by many cultivated speakers." Nor could the editors fail to dig cool cats who make stacked chicks flip. Without drips and pads and junkies, who bug victims for bread to buy horse for a fix, the dictionary of 1961 would...
Things came to a head at a meeting of satellite leaders in Moscow last winter. Hoxha called Khrushchev a "revisionist," one of the worst epithets in the Communist lexicon, since it means not going by the book. An enraged Khrushchev shouted back: "Comrade Hoxha, you have poured a bucket of dung on me, and you will have to wash...