An old fixation with dictionaries

Mohan Singh

My two elder brothers had matriculated from the Rangoon School Board affiliated to the University of London in the 1930s. One of them had a light-weight Collins Pocket Gem Dictionary printed on rice paper and bound in a soft plastic jacket. He hardly ever used it, but told me that those days, any book purchase of Rs 5 or more was entitled to this free gift.

In Punjab, not much English was spoken then, and one rarely, if ever, needed to use a dictionary, except perhaps to settle an argument on spelling. I remember an incident concerning my encounter with one in 1952. I was looking for a second-hand book on physics along the pavement, when I saw two ‘high gentry’ women haggling with the proprietor of a book shop at Hall Bazaar. They had purchased the thick, hard-bound Chamber’s Twentieth Century Dictionary, which they wanted to return and demanded a refund, because the book was moth-eaten. The shopkeeper didn’t have another copy, but was ready to refund Rs 7, which was not acceptable to the buyer. I was accompanied by my friend TS, and after leafing through the edition, we offered to buy it for Rs 10. He agreed and we contributed equal amounts as partners, the unwritten condition being that it would be used cooperatively on a monthly basis.

I wrote, in bold calligraphic capitals, my friend’s name on the fly page, thus granting him full ownership thereof, though it remained mostly with me. I, too, used it only while solving crosswords introduced as regular feature in a weekly as a promotional feature. Some dividend did come my way in the form of enhanced vocabulary. But after my BSc, I was eligible to do postgraduation, privately, only in English, the other subjects being restricted to regular students. Thus I landed in a college of repute, as a lecturer in English without any training in ‘teaching’ this language.

Awareness of only a cross-section of literature was taking a toll on my confidence, some of which returned when the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad, exposed us to the relevant technology: repeated presentation of carefully selected and graded structures. There, in 1977, we were introduced to the just-arrived Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary.

My obsession with dictionaries spread among friends and took me to subject dictionaries, and the heavy two-volume Reader’s Digest Great Illustrated Dictionary and its three-volume red Encyclopaedic Dictionary. When I went to the US to attend a wedding some years ago, my nephew gave me a parting gift—an 8-kg Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. It supplies the meaning of every English word, except novel coronavirus. It is likely to be the word of the century in all future publications, regardless of language.

Source: The Tribune (https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/musings/an-old-fixation-with-dictionaries-73962)

[…] o olho vê, a lembrança revê, e a imaginação transvê. […]

No Blog da Companhia das Letras encontrei hoje as “cartas para tempos de isolamento”. Transcrevo a seguir um trecho de uma delas.

Manoel de Barros deixou uma obra carregada de sensibilidade e leveza, e tornou-se um dos poetas mais populares do país. Nesta carta de 1995 à mestranda Sheila Moura Hue, ele responde a um questionário sobre sua formação e destaca o isolamento como alimento para a imaginação.
[…] O que alimenta meu espírito não é ler. É inventar. Fui criado no mato isolado. Acho que isso me obrigava a ampliar o meu mundo com o imaginário. Inventei meus brinquedos e meu vocabulário. […] Minha curiosidade intelectual nunca foi por histórias nem por indague sobre a vida e a morte — essas metafísicas. Eu gostava das frases, de preferência as insólitas. Este depoimento acho que não vai prestar pra sua tese. Mas eu tive boa vontade. Eu queria explicar que o menino isolado criou sozinho seu alimento espiritual. Assim que é: o olho vê, a lembrança revê, e a imaginação transvê. […] 

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Fools rush in: proverbs in English (1)

About Words - Cambridge Dictionary blog

Izumi T/Moment/Getty Images

by Liz Walter

Proverbs may seem rather old-fashioned or strange but when I started thinking about writing this post, I was amazed to realize how many of them are in common use. They serve as a convenient shorthand for something that would often be more complicated to say in a different way. We frequently use them at the end of a conversation to sum up what has been said, and many of them are so familiar that we can omit part of the phrase and still understand what is meant.

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The word of the year according to Merriam-Webster dictionary

Our Word of the Year for 2019 is they. It reflects a surprising fact: even a basic term—a personal pronoun—can rise to the top of our data. Although our lookups are often driven by events in the news, the dictionary is also a primary resource for information about language itself, and the shifting use of they has been the subject of increasing study and commentary in recent years. Lookups for they increased by 313% in 2019 over the previous year.

English famously lacks a gender-neutral singular pronoun to correspond neatly with singular pronouns like everyone or someone, and as a consequence they has been used for this purpose for over 600 years.

More recently, though, they has also been used to refer to one person whose gender identity is nonbinary, a sense that is increasingly common in published, edited text, as well as social media and in daily personal interactions between English speakers. There’s no doubt that its use is established in the English language, which is why it was added to the Merriam-Webster.com dictionary this past September.

Nonbinary they was also prominent in the news in 2019. Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (WA) revealed in April during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the Equality Act that her child is gender-nonconforming and uses they. Singer Sam Smith announced in September that they now use they and them as pronouns. And the American Psychological Association’s blog officially recommended that singular they be preferred in professional writing over “he or she” when the reference is to a person whose gender is unknown or to a person who prefers they. It is increasingly common to see they and them as a person’s preferred pronouns in Twitter bios, email signatures, and conference nametags.

The complete article on other 2019 words of the year is available at https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/word-of-the-year/they

Cambridge Dictionary’s Word of the Year 2019

About Words - Cambridge Dictionary blog

Our Word of the Year 2019 is . . . upcycling.

This word was chosen based on the Word of the Day that resonated most strongly with fans on the Cambridge Dictionary Instagram account, @CambridgeWords. The word upcycling – defined as the activity of making new furniture, objects, etc. out of old or used things or waste material – received more likes than any other Word of the Day (it was shared on 4 July 2019).

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Useful and Obscure Words for Autumn


Autumn

small-bridge-with-fallen-leaves

Definition – the season between summer and winter; also, a period of maturity or incipient decline

Autumn is more confusing, linguistically speaking, than most of the other seasons. It has had multiple titles (fall is common in the U.S., and it’s also been known as harvest and harvest-time), and the exact dates of the season vary some. Autumn can be defined as the time extending from the September equinox to the December solstice, or as “the season in the northern hemisphere comprising the months of September, October, and November” (in the southern hemisphere it runs from the March equinox to the June solstice). And to confuse things a bit more in British use it commonly refers to the months of August through October.

Summer has followed after Spring;
Now Autumn is so shrunk and sere,
I scarcely think a sadder thing
Can be the Winter of my year.
— Christina Georgina Rossetti, The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, 1998

Please read the complete article at https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/words-for-autumn-fall