UNUSUAL WORDS AND COLLOCATIONS 327 Here again we see that the unusual words are exactly right. Kipling implies the callousness of the British government to- ward those who died in its service in India: their coffins are merchandise, and the charges for loading and storage are care- fully calculated. Unusual Meanings Uncommonness may reside not so much in the rarity of the word itself, as in the meaning it carries. A writer may evoke an older meaning, closer to the etymological sense. Robert Frost, writing about the United States, speaks of the "land realizing itself westward." We think of realize as meaning "to understand clearly," and we must pause a moment to grasp that Frost calls up the older sense of "to make real": the na- tion created its reality as it drove westward. And in the fol- lowing sentence imagination does not have its common meaning of "creative faculty," but rather signifies the pro- ductions of that creativity: Universities flourished; scholars wrote their profundities and nov- elists their imaginations. Morris Bishop Everyday words may also be made striking by being shifted out of their usual grammatical roles. Here a writer describing the coming of spring employs indestructible as a noun: Under the spruce boughs which overlay the borders, the first shoots of snowdrops appeared, the indestructible. E. B. white Neologisms Neologisms constitute a special class of rare words. Literally "new words," they are made up by the writer. Some are new in being original combinations of phonemes (that is, sounds). James Thurber invents several such neologisms to describe the family car being hit by a trolley: For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org 328 DICTION Tires booped and whoosed, the fenders queeled and graked, the steering wheel rose up like a spectre and disappeared in the direc- tion of Franklin Avenue with a melancholy whistling sound, bolts and gadgets flew like sparks from a Catherine wheel. Thurber's coinages are onomatopoeic (imitating sound). In the next example the neologism is formed by adding a suffix which does not conventionally go with the word (and in the process making a pun): But once there came to "the grey metropolis" a Finnish lady—a most perfect representative of non-Aryan beauty and anythingarian charm—to whom not only men, but what is more wonderful, most women, fell captive the moment they saw her. George Saintsbury But probably most neologisms are novel compound words. Barbara Tuchman describes the most remarkable quality of a particular statesman as his "you-be-damnedness"; and a trav- eler in Sicily complains of the crude duckboards placed for tourists around an excavation of beautiful mosaics: It was a groan-making thing to do and only an archeologist could have thought of it. Lawrence Durrell Such constructions are called nonce compounds, which are distinct from the conventional compounds we all use, like teenager or schoolboy. Nonce compounds are usually hy- phenated, unlike conventional compounds, some of which are hyphenated and some written as one unit. Occasionally a nonce compound consists of a number of words strung to- gether in a phrase acting as a single grammatical part (usually a modifier) like the ten-word adjectival in this sentence (it modifies a three-word noun): I doubt whether even the breathless, gosh-gee-whiz-can-all-this-be- happening-to-me TV-celebrity-author could cap this shlock classic with another. Pauline Kael For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org ! UNUSUAL WORDS AND COLLOCATIONS 329 : Unusual Collocations i An unusual collocation is an unlikely combination of words, • each commonplace in itself but rarely used with the other(s). This description of a midwestern steel plant is an example: Republic Steel stood abrupt out of the flat prairie. Howard Fast We do not think of buildings as "standing abrupt," but for that very reason the diction is memorable, like the structures : it describes rearing dominantly out of the flat land. Here are several other instances: i the Crackling Sea . . . Dylan Thomas I The clammy hauteur of President Hoover i Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Under the trees, along the cemented paths go drifts of girls, sym- 1 pathetic and charming. . William Colding ' Any grammatical nexus may be made unusual; a subject and verb, for instance: i But her smile was the coup de grace and her sigh buried him ! deep. W. Somerset Maugham j Or a verb and complement: I He smiles his disappointments and laughs his angers. e. e. cummings i Unusual Verbs Verbs are a fertile source of implied meanings when joined with unlikely subjects or objects: I But the weeks blurred by and he did not leave. Willard R. Espy f For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org 330 DICTION no birdsong splintered the sunflecked silence. Joan Lindsey Often an unusual verb implies a comment: The more we prattle about morality, the more the world shows us how complicated things really are. Samuel c. Florman The cops squealed with excitement. Howard Fast . . . and then the hideous mannequins galumphed with squeaky shoes On Stage. Nancy Mitford Each of those verbs carries adverse connotations. "Prattle" suggests childishness; "squealed," a piglike quality; "gal- umph," comic awkwardness. And each enriches its passage, implying considerably more than it literally states. Unusual Adjectives Many other striking collocations involve a modifier (typically an adjective) and its headword, as in Dylan Thomas's "the crackling sea." One variety of such adjectives is known as a transferred epithet—a word customarily applied to a partic- ular noun or class of nouns which is used instead to modify something associated with that noun, as in "a boiling kettle." Here is a more original example: He would sit upstairs in his angry overalls, too angry to come down tO luncheon. Harold Nicholson Oxymoron and Rhetorical Paradox When the oddity of a collocation becomes seemingly contra- dictory, it is called an oxymoron. A famous instance is John Milton's description of hell as "darkness visible." In an ox- ymoron the modifier appears to contradict its headword: "How," we wonder, "can 'darkness' be 'visible'?" Several other examples: For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org UNUSUAL WORDS AND COLLOCATIONS 331 a practical mystic. . . . Lord Roseberry . delicious diligent indolence. . . . John Keats A yawn may be defined as a silent yell. c. K. Chesterton A rhetorical paradox is an oxymoron writ large. (An oxy- moron, in fact, has been defined as a "condensed paradox.") It too expresses an apparent contradiction, and differs only in being longer and in not condensing the contradiction into a headword and modifier: His soul will never starve for exploits or excitement who is wise enough to be made a fool of. c. K. Chesterton Oxymoron and rhetorical paradox must not be confused with the logical paradox, which asserts that something is si- multaneously both true and not true, thus violating what lo- gicians call the law of noncontradiction. A classic example is: "All Cretans are liars," said a Cretan. A rhetorical paradox, on the other hand, does not contain a true contradiction. It may seem to. Chesterton appears to be saying something that is logically paradoxical—can wisdom consist of being made a fool of? But the appearance vanishes when we understand that Chesterton is using "wise" and "fool" in special, though not unique, senses. By "wise" he means simple and pure in spirit, unworldly and good. By "fool," he means a trusting innocent, rather than a self- deluded egotist, the word's usual sense. Another kind of rhetorical paradox is less an apparent self- contradiction than an actual contradiction of a commonly ac- cepted belief: Baseball is an interminable game played by overgrown boys who have nothing better to do for the amusement of loafers who have nothing to do at all. For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org 33^ DICTION That unlikely sentence contains no inner contradiction, ap- parent or real, but it violently disagrees with conventional attitudes. Paradoxes of this sort may take the form of standing a cli- che or popular maxim on its head. Someone remarked, for instance, that the German General Staff "has a genius for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory." Oscar Wilde mocked Victorian morality by reversing the smug judgment that "drink is the curse of the working class"; he put it that . . . work is the curse of the drinking class. Oxymoron and rhetorical paradox, finally, can be espe- cially effective, if they grow naturally out of the subject and reveal an important truth about it. Accumulation, or Piling Up Accumulation, as we use it here, means stringing together a number of words, all the same part of speech and grammati- cally parallel, that is, connected to the same thing. Most com- monly the words are a series of verbs serving the same subject or of adjectives attached to the same headword: They glittered and shone and sparkled, they strutted, and puffed, and posed. Beverley Nichols He criticized and threatened and promised. He played the audience like an organ, stroked them and lashed them and flattered and scared and comforted them, and finally he rose on his toes and lifted his fists and denounced that "great betrayer and liar," Franklin Roosevelt. Wallace Stegner Lolling or larricking that unsoiled, boiling beauty of a common day, great gods with their braces over their vests sang, spat pips, puffed smoke at wasps, gulped and ogled, forgot the rent, embraced, posed for the dickey-bird, were coarse, had rainbow-coloured armpits, winked, belched, blamed the radishes, looked at llfracombe, played hymns on paper and comb, peeled bananas, scratched, found sea- For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org UNUSUAL WORDS AND COLLOCATIONS 333 weed in their panamas, blew up paper bags and banged them, wished for nothing. Dylan Thomas Manipulative, industrious, strangely modest, inexorable, decent, stodgy, staunch, the Habsburgs had come out of Switzerland in 1273. Frederic Morton How, people are asking, could four mopheaded, neo-Edwardian attired Liverpudlian-accented, guitar-playing, drumbeating "little boys" from across the ocean come here and attract the immense amount of attention they did by stomping and hollering out songs in a musical idiom that is distinctly American? John A. Osmundsen The unusualness of such diction lies not in unconventional or paradoxical combinations but in sheer quantity, and of course, in quality. Mixed Levels of Usage Level of usage means the degree of formality or of informality associated with a word. Some words have a limited range of appropriateness. They are suitable, say, for formal but not informal occasions (pedagogue). Contrarily, another word is at home in a colloquial atmosphere but not in a formal one (prof). But of course most words are always acceptable (teacher), and are not limited by usage restrictions. It is possible to achieve unusual diction by mixing words from different usage levels so that learned literary terms rub elbows with colloquialisms and slang: Huey [Long] was probably the most indefatigable campaigner and best catch-as-catch-can stumper the demagogically fertile South has yet produced. Hodding Carter American perceptions of empire have decline and fall built in. De- cline and fall are both the outcome of and the alternative to empire. Which puts Americans in a fine pickle today. James Oliver Robertson For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org 334 DICTION The line between formal and informal styles is not now held so inflexibly as it used to be. Many writers mix literary and colloquial diction with a freedom that would have been frowned upon a generation or two back. This freedom is wel- come. But it poses its own problems. The mix must work. It cannot be an artificial forcing of an occasional bit of slang to relieve relatively formal prose, or shouldering in a big word here and there to decorate a colloquial style. Words should always be chosen primarily because they say exactly what you want to say. When the mix does work, a writer achieves not only pre- cision but a variegated "speech" interesting in itself. Listen, for example, to this discussion of contemporary detective fiction: The moral fabric of any age, of any society, is a tapestry in which there are strikingly different and even antithetical motifs. Our pop- ular art forms show that the prevailing fashion in heroes runs to the extroverted he-man, the tough guy who saves the world with a terrific sock on the jaw of the transgressors, and the bang, bang of his pistol. But even this generation, so much exposed to philoso- phies of power, has its hankering for the light that comes from within; and in its folklore there appears, intermittently, a new kind of priest-hero—the psychoanalyst. Charles j. Rolo Rolo's language is generally literary (that is, belonging to for- mal, written prose): "moral fabric," "antithetical motifs," "transgressors," "philosophies of power," "intermittently," "priest-hero," "psychoanalyst." At the same time he works in colloquialisms: "he-man," "tough guy," "terrific sock on the jaw," "hankering." The diction is unpredictable. It sur- prises and thereby pleases us. But the mix achieves surprise and novelty without sacrific- ing exactness or economy. Indeed both the literary and the colloquial terms are justifiable for their precision. "Priest- hero," for example, sets the detective story into the wider framework of literature and folktale. "He-man" nicely suits the flavor of the tough private-eye fiction Rolo is discussing. For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org UNUSUAL WORDS AND COLLOCATIONS 335 It is possible to play off formal and colloquial language even more strikingly. In the following passage the journalist A. J. Liebling is describing fight fans, specifically those root- ing for the other guy: Such people may take it upon themselves to disparage the principal you are advising. This disparagement is less generally addressed to the man himself (as "Cavilan, you're a bum!") than to his oppo- nent, whom they have wrongheadedly picked to win. Liebling comically contrasts the deliberately inflated diction describing the fans' behavior ("disparage the principal you are advising") and the language they actually use ("Gavilan, you're a bum!"). For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org CHAPTER 29 Improving Your Vocabulary: Dictionaries Vocabulary is best extended by reading and writing. Memo- rizing lists of words has dubious value. The words are ab- stracted from any context, so that while you may learn the denotation you acquire little feeling for connotation and level of usage. Vocabulary should not be a forced plant but should grow naturally with learning and experience. A good dictionary is the key to extending your knowledge of words. Try to keep one handy as you read. When you come upon a word you don't know, pause and look it up. If you can't stop or have no dictionary nearby, make a check in the margin (assuming the book is your own) or write the word on a piece of paper. Without such a reminder you will prob- ably only remember that there was some word you intended to look up which now you can't recall. As you write, don't be satisfied with thinking you know what a word means or how it is spelled or functions gram- matically. If you aren't sure, open the dictionary. It's sur- prising how often what we think we know turns out to be wrong. General Dictionaries A general dictionary lists the words currently used by speak- ers and writers of a language or words readers are likely to For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org [...]... preliminary to the word list, varies from work to work, but in all cases it explains how the word list is set up, how to read an entry, what the abbreviations mean, and so on In addition front matter will likely contain general information, valuable to any writer, about English spelling, pronunciation, grammar, and usage Back matter, too, varies from book to book Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary,... scholars studying the history of words or ideas On the other hand, the OED is less useful for American English For example, someone curious about the meaning of Chicago pool or the origin of OK will have to consult Webster's Third New International Both unabridged dictionaries are necessary to a serious writer Special Dictionaries: Thesauri Special dictionaries are restricted to a particular aspect of... word list Although the front and the back matter contain much important information, the chief part of a dictionary is its word list To use the word list efficiently you need to understand how entries are organized and the kind of information they 1 The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Houghton Mifflin Company); The Random House College Dictionary, Revised Edition (Random House); Webster's... We'll return to these massive works a little later The abridged dictionary is of more immediate concern Several good ones are available.1 Whichever you own, take a little time to get familiar with its contents and organization A typical dictionary consists of three parts: the front matter, the word list, and the back matter or appendixes Front matter, which includes everything preliminary to the word... pronunciation is placed between slash marks and rendered in phonetic symbols (mostly similar in form to letters) whose values are listed at the bottom of each recto (right-hand) page The mark ' indicates stress It is placed before the accented syllable (that is, the one spoken with greatest force) yPart of speech n = noun Etymology Placed within brackets, the etymology uses capital abbreviations for... meaning or usage After the entry in the main word list of each of the terms in small caps following habit, there is a reference to this discussion Thus at the end of the entry for custom you will find "syn see HABIT." Homograph of habit, here a transitive verb meaning to clothe, to rlrocc ... dictionaries But they all list words according to a principle of alphabetization explained in the front matter, and they all indicate spelling (along with any variations), stress, syllabication, pronunciation, grammatical function (verb, noun, adjective, and so on), the different senses in which the word is used (the order of these may be historical or it may be according to frequency), and usually information... CUSTOM, USE, WONT mean a way of acting that has become fixed through repetition, HABIT implies a doing unconsciously or without premeditation, often compulsively; HABITUDE implies a fixed attitude or usual state of mind; PRACTICE suggests an act or method followed with regularity and usu through choice; USAGE suggests a cus- tomary action so generally followed that it has become a social norm; CUSTOM... www.tailieuduhoc.org IMPROVING YOUR VOCABULARY: DICTIONARIES 339 somewhere near the middle (It should be left that way to protect the binding.) Webster's Third New International lists more than 450,000 words, including many older expressions and technical terms omitted from abridgments In addition to the customary explanations, its front matter contains extensive discussions of spelling, punctuation, plural forms,... Latin, fr = from and pp = past participle Foreign words are italicized and their meanings are given in roman type without quotation marks y SMALL CAPS, here and elsewhere throughout the entry, signal that a term should be consulted in its alphabetical place in the word list for further information relevant to habit Definitions In this dictionary definitions are arranged in historical order Different senses . overalls, too angry to come down tO luncheon. Harold Nicholson Oxymoron and Rhetorical Paradox When the oddity of a collocation becomes seemingly contra- dictory,. as a transferred epithet—a word customarily applied to a partic- ular noun or class of nouns which is used instead to modify something associated with