WORD COLLECTING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 762, 26 February 1954, Page 12

WORD COLLECTING

A WORD IN EDGEWAYS, by Ivor Brown; JonathantCape, English price 7/6. VOR BROWN, whose stint of journalism has included responsible positions on the Manchester Guardian and The Times, has for many years been a collector of strange words. Begun almost as a hobby, as another man would collect lepidoptera or break out in model aeroplanes or the stamps of Brazil, his word-collecting habit has spread from newspaper contributions to one bound volume after another. This is the eighth volume of a‘series that includes I Give My Word and I Break My Word. The plan is simple. His correspondents tell him a new word down in Zummerzet or up in Wensleydale; and Brown, if he does not hare up and down the face of England, at least has a lot of fun flipping through the pages of what must be a most impressive collection of dictionaries. In no time he comes up with a brief article, sometimes quite scholarly, sometimes a mere surface skim along the troubled sea of semantics, but always readable and entertaining. As the articles pile up, another

Brown book on words is ready for the press. The process has no end. In spite of his promise (now in its third edition, at least) that this is the last word, the only thing likely to stop the flow is the latk of suitable titles containing the word "word." However, he has not yet used "My Word!" or "Words, Words, Words!" and I am sure at least two more volumes are on the way. The present volume begins with Alamodality and finishes with Zest. Between these two alnhabetic limits jt rung

the gamut through Alcohol (a rather dull little article; there is much more to be said), Betwottled (a wonderful word for "bewildered"); Cocky (he doesn’t know enough about Australia and New Zealand to do this one justice), Daddocky (full marxs here), Glout (a beauty!), Peripilocution ("Talking through one’s hat"), and that magnificent specimen. of gobbledygook, PostMortemization (what the coroner does). It is a haphazard collection, but none the worse for that. How many of us have come across a new word in the dictionary only because it was at the tep or the bottom of the page or.one up or one down from the word we were really looking for? Word-hunting is a good game and the trophies are at least as impressive as stuffed fish or mounted elephant’s tusks. You can do it at home, too, which is an advantage if the weather is too poor for peripatetic en-

tomologizing.

I.A.

G.