Fun With Words And Thurber

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30158, 15 June 1963, Page 3

Fun With Words And Thurber

(Reviewed by

E.B.L.]

In A Word By Margaret Ernst, with drawings by lames Thurber. Herbert Jenkins (first published 1939, Alfred Knopf). 160 pp.

“Rigmarole . . . Odd WO rd • ■ Wonder where it comes ’com?” When this sort of question crops up there may be a dictionary to help. Bui even if there is one in the house, let alone within reach from a fireside chair, there is usuaUy a welter of abbreviations and examples which seem, at first, to get in the way: the “late ME." “vbl sb 1611.” sort of thing. All good fun, of course: but in 1939 Margaret Ernst saw the value of making the game of looking up words, better still And no dictionary had engaged James Thurber to illuminate the text. Thurber’s imagination was not restrained by etymological considerations and his drawings for this book showed a feeling for words that the old M.E. and 1611 stuff quite failed to evoke in the Ordinary Man.

“In a Word" has just been revised and reissued. It does not exactly replace Oxford or Webster, if only because it contains no more than a few hundred words. In fact. most of the information comes directly from the Oxford English Dictionary. But m her witty and reliable way. Mrs Ernst reviews, in a few lines, the pedigree

of these words and their closes’, relations Sometimes she groups them for type: for example, jeans 'from a

And Mr Thurber thus:—

Genoese cotton cloth), denim (from Ide] Nimes and originally woollen) and duffel (a town near Antwerp where coarse cloth was woven). It is a fair introduction to the pleasures of word-hunting in a standard dictionary. Rigmarole, by the w r ay, seems to come from the term, ragman-roll, a 16th century list or catalogue. The original says Mrs Ernst, was a record of homage made to Edward I by the Scottish king and nobles in 1296. And there was a medieval game of ragman dealing with incoherent lists of words. Anyone who enjoys words, savours the fullness of their meanings and likes a little gossip about their origins should be enthralled, which Mrs Ernst explains thus:—

French en, in: and Middle English ral. a thrall, serf, slave, runner. When you are enthralled by a person, a play, a scene, you are enslaved.