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

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
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!
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

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:

"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.
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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

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

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.
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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-

General Dictionaries
A general dictionary lists the words currently used by speak-
ers and writers of a language or words readers are likely to
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IMPROVING YOUR VOCABULARY: DICTIONARIES
337
come across in older literature. If it includes all such terms, it
is unabridged. If it reduces the list by omitting many technical
or archaic words, it is an abridged edition, sometimes called
a desk dictionary.
Two unabridged dictionaries are standard for modern En-
glish: Webster's Third New International Dictionary (G. &
C. Merriam Company) and the Oxford English Dictionary,
familiarly known as the
OED
(Oxford University Press).
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 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.

constitute the "authority." Lexicographers collect hundreds,
even thousands, of citations for each word they list. From
these they determine how the word is actually pronounced
and spelled, what meanings it is given, and any regional, so-
cial, or occupational facts affecting its use. If a lexicographer
has personal feelings about spelling, pronunciation, or defi-
nition, he or she does not substitute these for what the cita-
tions reveal.
The exact arrangement of information in a typical entry will
vary a bit among dictionaries. But they all list words accord-
ing to a principle of alphabetization explained in the front
matter, and they all indicate spelling (along with any varia-
tions), stress, syllabication, pronunciation, grammatical func-
tion (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
about the word's etymology (that is, its origin and history).
Here are two sample entries, each with explanations. The
first is from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary:
The second example comes from The American Heritage
Dictionary of the English Language (see pages 340-345).
Unabridged Dictionaries
Occasionally you will come across a word not in your desk
dictionary. Turn then to an unabridged work. The standard
for American English is Webster's Third New International
Dictionary (G. & C. Merriam Company). This is the volume
you find in most libraries, usually on its own stand and open
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IMPROVING YOUR VOCABULARY: DICTIONARIES
339

are necessary to a serious writer.
Special Dictionaries: Thesauri
Special dictionaries are restricted to a particular aspect of
the general language or to the language of a specific group,
profession, or region. There are hundreds of such works,
many available in the reference section of most libraries.
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'hab
• it \
'hab-9t
\ n [ME, fr. OF, fr. L habitus condition,
character, fr. habitus, pp. of habere to have,
hold—more
at GIVE]
1
archaic:
CLOTHING 2 a : a costume characteris-
tic of a calling, rank, or function b : RIDING HABIT 3 :
BEARING, CONDUCT 4 : bodily appearance or makeup :
PHYSIQUE 5 : the prevailing disposition or character of a
person's thoughts and feelings : mental makeup
6:
a usual
manner of behavior : CUSTOM 7 a : a behavior pattern
acquired by frequent repetition or physiologic exposure
that shows itself in regularity or increased facility of per-
formance b : an acquired mode of behavior that has
become nearly or completely involuntary 8 : characteris-
tic mode of growth or occurrence
9

vt:
CLOTHE, DRESS
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Main entry
Superscript
1
indicates that this is the first of two or more homo-
graphs (words having the same spelling and sound but used in
different senses).
The dot marks the syllabication. If you must split a word
between lines, break it only at a point indicated by a dot.
Pronunciation
In this dictionary the 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 syl-
lable (that is, the one spoken with greatest force).
yPart
of speech
n = noun.
Etymology
Placed within brackets, the etymology uses capital abbreviations
for languages and lowercase abbreviations for other words: thus
ME = Middle English, OF = Old French, L = Latin, fr. = from and
pp. = past participle. Foreign words are italicized and their
meanings are given in
roman