Tài liệu Essential guide to writing part 22 pdf

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:
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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
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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

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
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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:
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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.
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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

. . . 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-
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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
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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.
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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-

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!").
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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
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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.

Back matter, too, varies from book to book. Webster's Sev-
enth New Collegiate Dictionary, for instance, discusses punc-
tuation in its back matter and includes lists of famous persons,
of important places, and of colleges in the United States and
Canada. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English
Language does not cover punctuation but includes people
and places in the general word list.
Although the front and the back matter contain much im-
portant 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 New World Dictionary, Second College Edition
(Simon and Schuster); Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (G. & C.
Merriam Company); Webster's II New Riverside University Dictionary
(Houghton Mifflin Company).
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338
DICTION
give. We'll look at two typical entries in some detail. But first
a caution: while a dictionary is an authority, its authority is
of a special and limited nature. It does not tell you how a
word should be spelled or spoken or used; it simply tells you
how it is spelled or spoken or used. The forms and meanings
of words depend on the speakers and writers of English. Act-
ing in unconscious collectivity,
they—or
rather we, all of
us—

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

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 ex-
planations, its front matter contains extensive discussions of
spelling, punctuation, plural forms, the use of italics, and the
handling of compound words. Accompanying the word list
are thousands of illustrations (a few in the form of color
plates) and numerous tables (the chemical elements, for in-
stance, the Indo-European language family, radio frequencies,
time zones, and so on).
Even more massive is the Oxford English
Dictionary,
pub-
lished by the Oxford University Press in twelve volumes with
four volumes of supplements. Several features distinguish the
OED. It lists older words than the Third New International
and arranges definitions in historical order, illustrating each
sense by dated quotations (totaling about 1,800,000). These
begin with the earliest known use of a word in a particular
sense and include, if possible, at least one instance for every
century thereafter until the present (or until the last known
example in the case of obsolete words or meanings). The dated
citations make the OED indispensable for 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 Web-
ster'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
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

of a
crystal:
charac-
teristic assemblage of forms at crystallization leading to a
usual appearance 10 : ADDICTION
I
Syn
HABIT, HABITUDE, PRACTICE, USAGE, CUSTOM, USE,
WONT mean a way of acting that has become
fixed
through
repetition,
HABIT implies a doing unconscious-
ly or without premeditation, often compulsively; HABI-
TUDE implies a
fixed
attitude or usual state of mind;
PRACTICE suggests an act or method followed with reg-
ularity and usu. through choice; USAGE suggests a cus-
tomary action so generally followed that it has become
a social norm; CUSTOM applies to a practice or usage so
steadily associated with an individual or group as to
have the force of unwritten law;
USE
and WONT are rare
in speech, and differ in that USE stresses the fact of
repeated action, WONT the manner of it.
I
2
habit

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

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 are distinguished by boldface arabic numerals;
nuances within the same sense, by boldface lowercase letters.
Archaic is a status label indicating that a word, or as in this
case, a particular sense of a word, is used very rarely by con-
temporary speakers and writers.
Of a crystal is a subject label indicating a special sense of the
word in a particular subject or profession, here crystallography.
Synonyms
A discussion of a group of words similar in sense but subtly dif-
ferent in meaning or usage. After the entry in the main word list
of each of the terms in small caps following habit, there is a ref-
erence to this discussion. Thus at the end of the entry for cus-
tom you will find "syn see HABIT."
Homograph of habit, here a transitive verb meaning to clothe, to
rlrocc
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