Quoth the Maven 'Evermore'

...But the making of major dictionaries is not only a Herculean task...

...Look up taovala, and you'll read: "In Tonga, a piece of fine matting worn round the waist over a vala or Tongan kilt (and without which one is not considered properly dressed...

...Thus we have an entry for stotinka," a Bulgarian unit of currency, one-hundredth of a lev...

...Earp of Exeter College, Oxford, matriculated in...

...Earp...

...round their waists kept the Royal party as cool as they could...

...Stonier entitled The Shadow Across the Page...

...Still, if stotinki are in OEDS4, how come there is no entry for the not unpopular adjective derived from Alfred Jarry's antihero, ubuesquel The final entry in this concluding volume, Zyrian, does not spell finis to the epic of the Oxford English Dictionary and its Supplements...

...1911," and, though it says nothing about "softness," quotes Tolkien (1944)— "T.W...

...and is " a misinterpretation" of a participial form even if, in 1975, it managed to sneak past the New Yorkers renownedly vigilant checking department...

...It is a place where past and present culture meet, where each entry is a miniature book on an alphabetized shelf, providing through the medium of language information about every aspect of life and thought...

...Personally, I was grateful to learn that I was wrong to use the phrase en travesti, which " is not recorded in Fr...

...Thus we get in rapid succession Seilbahn from Germany, Sejm from Poland, selamlik from Turkey...

...The spread of Americanisms is especially evident when the examples are heartily British: Under tacky, one finds a citation from the Listener of 1983 about "cheerfully dreadful jokes and inventively tacky songs...

...We find hortatory examples of the incorrect use of, say, titivate (for titillate) and wracked (for racked), clearly labeled as erroneous...

...Long ago, I came across an English translation of Madame Bovary by two men whose names epitomized to my Yugoslav ears all things British (not least on account of those wonderfully cavalier initials): G.W...

...Reviewed by John Simon Contrary to popular belief, a dictionary is not simply for looking up the meanings, spellings and pronunciations of words...

...In the Bibliography, I lit upon Naked Lunch listed as The Naked Lunch...

...What about (illit...

...Look up the word in any earlier dictionary, even in Eric Partridge's marvelous one of slang, and all you get is that it means a silly, contemptible, insignificant person, dates from circa 1923, and is of unknown origin...

...So we find trashed, described as a chiefly but not exclusively U.S...

...Since all but one of the quotations come from technical sources, and since even a lev is hardly worth a plugged nickel, why not stow the stotinka...

...And one that felicitously blends all styles, old and new...

...under twat, this from Ger-maine Greer's The Female Eunuch (1970), "No woman wants to find out that she has a twat like a horse-collar...

...And where would we be without this quotation from S. Moody's Penny Dreadful (1984):" Half the world starved while the other half joined Weight Watchers...

...Indeed, the OEDS is so cosmopolitan that it features the odd quotation in a foreign language...

...The combined dictionaries, he says, "stand as a permanent and proud reminder of eternal verities and incontrovertible values...

...The OEDS is particularly open to Americanisms, as is all the English-speaking world except for a few diehards...

...Still, Kingsley Amis is right to wonder, after observing approvingly that the Concise Oxford Dictionary uses "(joc...

...Linguisticians, who study how people talk, will never admit their subjects are ignorant...

...As his granddaughter put it in her biography of Murray, " The one thing of which he was certain was that it was not the function of the Dictionary to establish a standard of 'right' or 'wrong.' It was to record facts....' The reference here, though, is to pronunciation...

...True, it takes alot of leafing to make this house a home, but when a dictionary is as comprehensive and incisive as the Oxford English Dictionary (its abbreviation, OED, feels like an affectionate nickname) and its four mighty supplements—the fourth, OEDS4, has just appeared—immersing oneself in it is as sensible and sensuous as moving into a well-appointed, enormously comfortable house...

...In the last illustrative quotation, from the Daily Telegraph of 1977, we discover that "Pretty Tongan girls in white with the Taovala...

...Which reminds me: If there is one thing I regret about OEDS' practices, it is the perhaps inevitable space-saving device of turning authors' given names into initials...

...One of its lesser apothegms reads in its entirety: "That cloud is not in any dictionary.' Now that the OED and OEDS are complete, I bet it is...

...A man whose anti-athletic and probably homosexual esthet-icism angers the jocks gives his name to what they are...

...Take, for instance, tutti quanti, an Italian term, for which the first example is in the French of Mme...

...Traditionally worn by the male (with the exception of the Queen as monarch...

...For melancholy types of a bookish, word-orientedsort, the OEDS4 may prove more sustaining than a pack of sealyhams...

...rather, he entered the English language as twerp...

...the other was the refusal, not complete yet appreciable, to be prescriptive...

...The quotations in the sexual entries have a wide range: Under tush, this from George V. Higgins' Raton Fire (1981),"Her tush is tight and she's got great boobs...

...colloquialism, illustrated by, among others, the following quotation from the Tucson Citizen: "'I' ve sat through this mo vie three times.' ...' In this trashed-out theater...

...Partridge knows a bit better: He adds "a 'soft' person" to his definition and dates it around 1910...

...It should be torn in several places, to show that the wearer does not set himself above his fellows...

...de Sevigne, the last in the English of Janet Flanner, theTVew Yorker's Paris correspondent—who, however, shows off by adding the Italian for and: "...Barrymore, Bankhead, Hayes e tutti quanti...

...By the time you have finished the job, the language has moved on so considerably that all manner of addenda and corrections become necessary...

...It is the biggest dictionary of the world's richest language, one of those rare achievements, lexicographic or otherwise, for which "monumental" might bean understatement...

...A dictionary that tells you jokes—even trashy ones—is to be cherished...

...it is also a Sisyphean labor...

...Otherwise, the eagle-eyed Telegraph would have spotted the holes...

...A really good dictionary is, like a house, a place to live in: to work and relax, meditate and roam about, love and learn...

...As Burch-field puts it in the Preface, there is "the necessity of recording the indelicate as well as the delicate or neutral words of our century, demotic vocabulary as well as that which is taken to be elegant, words that offend ethnic sensibilities...

...Certain statements by lesser-known writers, whose full names do not appear in the Bibliography, take on a subtly different flavor according to the sex of their perpetrators...

...Those are the chief movers: the new words that arise from scientific, social and cultural developments, and the declining old words that fade and change because people no longer know how to pronounce them or what they mean...

...There were t wo obj ections that could be raised against "the great Oxford English Dictionary," to use the Homeric epithet Edmund Wilson steadily affixed to it...

...Here the illustrative quotations come from the works, mostly poetic, of Whit-tier, Betjeman, Joyce, J.R...

...Incidentally, it was over some of the unflattering examples for Jew that death threats were received and a lawsuit sustained...

...But under the latter, we get examples from rather undistinguished sources, even though, of all people, Nabokov commits this error in a letter to Edmund Wilson (April 17,1950), apropos a "wracking, unceasing pain and panic...

...Well, yes and no (which, by the way, rates an entry in OEDS4...

...But in a gigantic undertaking, tiny human lapses are inevitable...

...and "(vulg...

...Stonier and T. W. Earp...

...Both were persuaded that [inclusion] in the largest Oxford dictionary posed no threat to their marks...

...But the second entry is sea, and it receives two-and-a-half pages, including such fascinating compounds as sea-blown, sea-fed, sea-lulled, sea-strewn, sea-sucked...

...it rates only five illustrative quotations— one of them from my former fellow student at Harvard, the late Achilles Fang, who wrongly calls it a lute...

...Earp, the original twerp"—amplified by Roy Campbell (1957): "T.W...

...Other than that, the OEDS, whose gestation stretched from 1957 to '86, is as much a marvel as its predecessor, which it corrects and augments, sometimes even with earlier examples of usage that escaped the OED's editors...

...The picture is that good?' 'It's a lousy picture...

...Dictionaries, bear in mind, require the sort of patient, circumspect scholarship that can never catch up with the lightning shifts in language caused by the onslaught of discoveries and the march of ignorance...

...almost like illegal immigrants.' The new approach is to be saluted, as is the even greater deinsularizaiion Burchfield doesn't bother to mention: Innumerable words from foreign languages that have surfaced in English texts make a massive showing...

...This is a fearless dictionary...

...Lowell, de la Mare, Yeats, Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and a poem from the New Statesman of 1966 that visualizes the soul as "round and smooth/ Like a sea-sucked pebble.' All these marine words at the beginning of OEDS4 have a liberating effect, because the final parts of OEDS3 induce the confined feeling of a shtetl or ghetto, with Yiddish words starting in sch coming at you in serried ranks...

...Lawrence' sLast Poems, that Earp, a distinguished art critic, had so angered Lawrence with an attack on the poet-novelist's erotic paintings as to beget a pasquinade beginning, "I heard a little chicken chirp: / My name is Thomas, Thomas Earp...

...So we debouch on the beautiful sea and, abit further on, under sealyham, learn not only about the origin and looks of this delightful breed, but also, from a translation of Lorenz' Man Meets Dog, that a "sealyham's love of fun and his fidelity to his master can prove a real moral support to a melancholy type of person...

...It includes twat and tits and ass or arse, wang/whang and wank off/whank off, also such words as spade, spic and yid...

...Accordingly, the original OED itself came out with a 13th volume...

...and the literary language as well as the ordinary printed word...

...And it is in a French quotation that I found the first mistake, or typo...

...The original 12-volume OED, conceived in 1857 and finished in 1928, was produced largely under the leadership of the admirable Sir James Murray, who did not live to see its completion...

...From this we must conclude, first, that women's liberation has reached Tonga if girls can wear the taovala...

...The four volumes contain "some62,750 words, with an estimated 527,500 quotations, spread over 5,750 pages...

...And somewhere along the line I picked up a book of pensees and aphorisms by G.W...

...Besides the dazzling array of technical terms in this as in the three other Supplements , OEDS4 contains a sprinkling of trade names that have become common nouns...

...Already computers are at work integrating the OED and the OEDS into the New OED, even if Burchfield has gone on to fry other fish...

...To end on a cheerier note, let me give you an example of the kind of heartening epiphany browsing through this lexical landmark affords...

...But OEDS4 makes it all come clear by referring us to "T.W...

...You can learn far more esoteric things, too...

...Under semeiology, Ferdinand de Saus-sure refers to the discipline whose father he was as "une science...

...A German word such as Sehnsucht, defined as "yearning, wishful longing," is obviously totally at home in an English dictionary, as the many quotations from distinguished sources attest, but what is truly commendable is the hospitality extended to less traveled words...

...nous le [for la] nommerons semiologie...

...everyone knows it's by Kaufman and Hart...

...Another quotation, however, from You Can't Take It With You, ascribes that play to "Hart and Kaufman," no doubt because of some system of alphabetization...

...I knew nothing else about them then, though I learned much later, from reading D.H...

...It turns out now that the critic did not need Lawrence to confer dubious immortality upon him...

...I wish I had his optimism about the incon-trovertibility of English in a world hellbent on contro- and subverting not only the English language but also human survival itself...

...From the various quotations you can learn more than you want about this dread "science...

...Se, the first entry in this volume that extends from se to Zyrian, is the name of a Chinese 25-stringed instrument...

...on other matters, Murray and his successors were less permissive...

...Robert Burchfield, the editor of the four-volume Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, or OEDS, does include "dirty" words, but may go even further than Murray toward descrip-tiveness and avoidance of prescription...

...and, second, that these true egalitarians have put an end to fake egalitar-ianism by wearing their taovalas un-torn...

...The only slight cavil I have left is with the compulsive inclusiveness of OEDS4 and its three predecessors...

...In an article in the Bookseller, Burchfield notes a "resounding victory" over Weight Watchers Inc...

...There are no words in English starting in sd, save the old expletive 'sdeathl, short for God's death!, and that doesn't rate an entry...

...illiterate, used only by those who have no wish to write accurately or vigorously...

...gave the English language the word twirp, really twearp, because of the Goering-like wrath he kindled in the hearts of rugger-playing stalwarts at Oxford, when he was president of the Union, by being the last, most charming, and wittiest of the 'decadents.'" How curious is linguistic—or is it historical—destiny...

...Inclusive and permissive as it is, OEDS4 does contain some useful warnings...

...I can't get my feet unstuck from the floor...

...experts on hornbills or Canada geese will tell you how intelligent theirs are...

...and " a classic minor encounter with the manufacturers of Yale locks...

...In the Preface, Burchfield, a New Zea-lander, announces the attention "given to the sprawling vocabularies of all English-speaking countries," as opposed to "Murray's insular policy" of treating words from "North America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the West Indies...

...One was the absence of obscene and scatological words Victorian prudery would not allow...

...You will forgive me, then, if I read, even for a discussion of the last volume alone, rather selectively: 1,424 triple-column demi-quarto pages are more than I can handle in what remains of my lifetime...

...As soon consider a house merely a place to keep us dry, warm or cool...

...nevertheless, I would guess there are very few outright errors, although there appear to be someinherited mistakes: Aquota-tion from the Toronto magazine Saturday Night—appropriately under the heading trash—spells John Huston as "Houston...