american english dictionary contemp usage

When we speak or write we want to be understood and respected. We want to convey our meaning and we want to do it in a way that will command admiration. To accomplish these ends we must know the meanings of words, their specific meanings and their connotations, implications and overtones, and we must know how to combine words effectively into sentences. A dictionary can help us to understand the meaning of a word. But the only way to understand a word fully is to see it in use in as many contexts as possible. This means that anyone who wants to improve his vocabulary must read a great deal and must make sure that he understands what he reads. There is no short cut to this kind of knowledge. If a man thinks that noisome and noisy are synonyms, if he uses focus and nexlls interchangeably, if he sees no difference between refute and deny and if he assumes that disinterested means uninterested, he will not say what he means. Indeed, he may even say the exact opposite of what he means. Respectable English is a much simpler matter. It means the kind of English that is used by the most respected people, the sort of English that will make readers or listeners regard you as an educated person. Doubts about what is respectable English and what is not usually involve quest:ions of grammar. There are some grammatical constructions, such as that there dog and he ain’t come yet, that are perfectly intelligible but are not standard English. Such expressions are used by people who are not interested in “book learning.” They are not used by educated people and hence are regarded as “incorrect” and serve as the mark of a class. There is nothing wrong about using them, but in a country such as ours where for a generation almost everybody has had at least a high school education or its equivalent few people are willing to use expressions that are not generally approved as “correct.” A man usually thinks about his work in the language that his co-workers use. Turns of speech that may have been natural to a statistician when he was a boy on a farm simply do not come to his mind when he is talking about statistics. Anybody whose work requires intellectual training-and this includes everybody whose work involves any amount of writing-speaks standard English naturally and inevitably, with possibly a few insignificant variations. But many people who speak well write ungrammatical sentences. There seems to be some demon that numbs their fingers when they take hold of a pen, a specter called “grammar” which they know they never understood in school and which rises to fill them with paralyzing uncertainty whenever they stop to think. The only way to exorcise this demon is to state some of the fundamental facts of language. And one of the most fundamental is that language changes constantly. People living in the United States in the middle of the twentieth century do not speak the English of Chaucer or of Shakespeare. They don’t even speak the English of

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