WORDS WITHOUT STINT

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 20110, 31 March 1928, Page 6

WORDS WITHOUT STINT

GREAT task of editing the Oxford English Dictionary comes to an end this year: it has occupied nearly half a century and will have provided half a million definitions. We are accustomed to being shocked when we are told how few words the average educated person actually employs in his daily conversation or correspondence. A total of a few thousand is rarely passed; but the O.E.D. has had to make room for 414,825. Of course a vast number of these are the rarities now only valuable to connoisseurs of the cross-word puzzle. None the less the sum is so vast as to suggest that we might well study the dictionary as much 1o equip ourselves with new words as to discover old meanings. It is true that if we flaunt the more remote verbal curios we shall not be popular with audience or readers, but it is also worth remark that, whereas Ihe young exquisites of most ages have relished a verbal flourish and the “taffeta phrases, silken terms precise” of Euphuism and its cousins in richness, some of our own youth shows a dull preference' for having very few words and making them all sound strangely similar.

The accent and the manner which praises its likes as being “too fearfla devane” is still attributed to Oxford. We distrust the attribution, but we can also be thankful that in Oxford the saving as well as the sin is to be found. Let the sufferers from verbal and vocal poverty apply themselves to the O.E.D. and its 414,825 words.