The Complete Word Book

[Arnold Zwicky]

my daughter, who is always on the look-out for little things that
would please me, has given me a copy of this book, a cheap ($9.98)
1999 barnes & noble reprint of the 1991 original ($29.95).  the
author-compiler is Mary A. De Vries (about whom we learn nothing
whatsoever, in the book or on its jacket - not even a "Ph.D." tag).
the jacket touts the volume as "an exhaustive resource for
anyone...searching for just the right word."

it's got lists of all sorts of things, including words to use
(because, like BEAUTIFUL, they "please"), those to avoid (because,
like ARGUE, they "antagonize"; or like BOOK, they're "vague"; or, like
the reflexive pronouns - enumerated in a separate list - they're
"overused intensifiers").  there's even a three-page Glossary of
Linguistics, with terms that didn't get defined elsewhere in the book,
including VOWEL ("Any one of the letters a, e, i, o, or u." and
BIOLINGUISTICS ("The study of language and communication as
biologically induced, with an emphasis on genetics and
neurophysiology.")

there are two fundamental questions about this book: where on earth
did she get this stuff?  (there is not a source cited anywhere in
the volume.  possibly just as well; who would want to take credit
for this great plum pudding of information, misinformation, garbled
information, half-truths, and random factoids?)  and who could
possibly have use for it?

need a compact list of acronyms for organizations? this is your place
to go. true, they're almost all american (there's LEDC, the league
for emotionally disturbed children, but no BBC), and there are notable
omissions (LSA includes the linguistic society of america, but ADS
covers the alzheimer's disease society and the american daffodil,
dahlia, dental, and denture societies, but not the american dialect
society).  in search of an alphabetized list of the meridians and
base lines in the u.s.?  (my household looks up so much stuff that
we've *always* kept reference works in the dining room, but we've
never even once been curious about the San Bernardino base line
(california) or the St. Helena Meridian (louisiana).)  de vries
has the stuff.  looking for a preposition, wondering just what
the Common English Prepositions are?  go to chapter 27, where you'll
find not only BETWIXT, ABAFT, and ERE, but also BATING (which my
oed tells me means 'except' and had its heyday about 300 years ago).

almost every page is a masterpiece.  the book is an endless source
of pleasure (well, it halts abruptly on p. 493, when it runs out of
"words" in the index).  it's also made me reconsider my position
on banning books from school libraries.

remember, only $9.98, and probably only at barnes & noble!

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)