Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 28, 1992 TAG: 9201280485
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CLAYTON BRADDOCK
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
DICTIONARY DITHERING WORDS OF A FEATHER SHOULD NOT BE USED WITH SUCH FUZZY
WE ARE enriched - nearly inundated - by war, famine, economic strangulation, the shock of redrawing the world political map, corruption in politics and a host of other crises. It's not as if we needed one more. Yet, there is another. Listen up, people.No doubt, language may be the most abused living thing on Planet Earth. The real problem is not what's wrong but where we are losing ground. One unsuspected enemy is a longtime keeper of the faith: the dictionary.
Leave it to an insomniac and a red-eyed vireo to discover the first sign of the weakened bastion. You don't know what a red-eyed vireo is? Read on, McDuff.
It was all the fault of a newsweekly story about an Ozark Mountains woodchopper. The article was a lively, uncomplicated feature about a man who makes a living cutting trees for a manufacturer of charcoal. All went well until the last line. I was ready for sleep until I read: "In the woods beyond, a red-eyed vireo sings."
Vireo? One of my eyes shot up in drowsy wonder.
Obviously, a bird. But not much help there. I know a few red-eyed specimens who sing in the woods and even take wing inspired by various spirits, but those birds are human humming birds.
"Vireo: any of various small insectivorous American passerine birds," explained Webster's Ninth Collegiate.
"Passerine?" I said aloud, forcing my eyelids up a tad to stave off sleep. Hold the phone, ed. Words, intended to be bridges to understanding, sometimes become barriers to knowledge. I went for another definition like a beer drinker goes for another peanut.
"Passerine: Of or relating to the largest order of birds . . . chiefly . . . altricial songbirds of perching habits," Webster told me.
Altricial? Stop showing off, Noah.
I am not always comforted in knowing there are language watchdogs out there fighting ignorance and terminal dilettantism, writers like William Safire, word maven of The New York Times, and James Kilpatrick, whose writing column regrettably no longer appears in the Roanoke Times & World-News.
These soldiers attack the syntactical sin of our national leaders as well as us common folk. But is that enough? The battle has broken out on other fronts.
An army of such stalwarts may not be enough to win the battle for clear expression and understanding. They may not fully understand the intensity of the battle and the nature of the enemy, an enemywho would play games with words like altricial.
"Altricial: Being hatched or born or having the young hatched or born in a very immature and helpless condition so as to require care for some time." Sounded more like some of our children, but I got the picture.
Even though my groggy mind was trying to hang Zs up on my big empty mental screen, the rattle of Webster's pages had rattled my cage and called my mind to full alert.
To the newsweekly author: Why not just say, "Beyond them a songbird warbled"? I don't think any reasonable American birder would object. I'm sure the author of the story felt she had to be more specific - reportorial detail, you know. But, in deference to the reader and reportorial detail, she could have wrapped it up with: "Beyond them warbled a red-eyed, insect-eating, unemployed, homebound perching songbird."
Who wants to read the dictionary at 4 a.m., knowing dictionary editors lie in wait with a definition, hidden inside an explanation, wrapped inside an enigma?