Mitford M. Mathews

THE FRESHMAN AND HIS DICTIONARY

(APPLIED ENGLISH LINGUISTICS)

[...] Dictionaries are tools, and they are much more complicated and capable of many more uses than students suspect. All of us know students need encouragement and guidance in the use of dictionaries [...]. Composition books for freshmen point out the need for instruction of this kind. Despite what is being done, however, the fact is easily observable that few students are able to use their dictionaries with anything like efficiency. Certainly there must be very few of those who come up through the grades these days who are not familiar with the details of looking up words in dictionaries, but it is one thing to find a word in a dictionary and quite another to understand fully the information there given about it. It seems to me that college freshmen are fully prepared for and could profit by a well-planned introduction to the larger of the English dictionaries, and an acquaintance with what they contain. Such a program might well include material of the following kinds. Students should know something about the large, unabridged dictionaries to which they have ready access in college. They might well be given brief sketches of the Oxford English Dictionary, the English Dialect Dictionary by Joseph Wright, the old Century Dictionary (12 volumes) and the modern unabridged Webster. These may be called the “Big Four” in the dictionary field.

An acquaintance with these larger works will not only make the student aware of what kind of information about words is available in them, but it will leave him much better prepared to make efficient use of the desk-size dic­tionary with which he has some familiarity. [...]

It is to be hoped that in such general instructions as may be given about the different dictionaries, some emphasis will be placed on the fact that modern dictionaries do their utmost to record usage, not to prescribe it. [...]

The attention usually devoted to instruction in the use of the dictionary apparently stresses spellings, meanings, and pronunciations somewhat in the order here given. [...]

The impression, however, inevitably conveyed by instruction restricted altogether to employing the dictionary as a problem-solver, is that such a book is of no particular use unless there is a problem requiring immediate attention. Students are sorely tempted to so manipulate things as to avoid encountering problems that drive them to a dictionary. It is to be feared that, for many of them, the dictionary is a form of medicine to be resorted for only in time of unavoidable need. It is a most helpful thing for the student to learn that dictionaries are filled with interesting information from which one can derive much pleasure and instruction, even though he may not be confronted with an urgent problem of any kind.

Students should be encouraged to develop a wholesome curiosity about words that present no particular problem in spelling, pronunciation, or meaning. As a rule, the words we know well do not rise to the surface of our consciousness. It is only rarely that some common, everyday term forces itself upon our attention so urgently that for the first time we turn to the dictionary to see what lies back of it.

This use of the dictionary when there is no immediate, pressing need to do so, this giving attention to words we have known for a long time but have never grown curious about, is most rewarding. [...]