bob@cadovax.UUCP (Bob "Kat" Kaplan) (03/05/85)
> In addition to the *OED* and *AHD*, let me recommend [...] > *Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words* by > Josefa Heifetz Byrne (Pocket Books; $3.50). I have a copy of this book and although I'm not sorry I bought it, I am reluctant to unconditionally recommend it. From just a cursory, casual flipping through of pages, I found a number of things that I didn't like. First of all, her exclusion of etymology is annoying. She offers an excuse for this, but in a book that deals with unusual words, it's nice to know the meaning of individual morphs. Her pronunciation guide is inadequate as well. As far as I can tell, she doesn't recognize the difference in pronunciation between "bar" and "bore," or between "awe" and "ah." Some of the words listed are just not unusual, obscure, or preposterous, and could probably be found in any dictionary. I don't have the book in front of me so I can't cite any examples, but I think I saw "inchoate" in there. Whereas most dictionaries use "he" and "him" in their definitions, this one uses "she" and "her." I don't particularly mind substituting one form of sexist language with another, but in a book like this it would've been helpful if she had stated in her preface that she was going to do this. There were definitions where this was confusing to me at first, e.g., there's a word that she defined to mean something like "a form of insanity where the person believes she's a dog" -- I honestly didn't know if this was a type of insanity that afflicted only females until I saw some other of her definitions later on in the book. Some of the definitions are inadequate, some are just plain "cutesy," and some are contradictory. For example, she distinguished between "ideograph" and "ideogram," the latter being a writing system where the tokens represent pictures/ideas instead of words. I'm not sure that the distinction is even correct, but nonetheless, later on she defined "Kanji" as a Japanese writing system using Chinese ideographs. Finally, what does she have against Alexander the Great? I don't have an opinion either way, but at least twice she refers to him as "Alexander the Allegedly Great" without any further explanation. Now I'm curious, was he great or wasn't he? She seems to know something. Why isn't she telling? Like I said, these are some things that stuck in my mind after skimming through the book. I wasn't reading it with an eye toward writing a book review. I'm just worried that when I do start to look at it more carefully, I might begin to think that this is just another stupid word-trivia book. -- Bob Kaplan "Pain and sorrow are the result of attachment and desire."