More Words [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION The introduction to the first collection of Words columns from The Observer told how the feature originated and took shape. It contained, as is common, acknowledgments to people who had ™ . helped it develop - academics, lexicographers, colleagues, my family - and ended with thanks, 'most of all perhaps to readers of The Observer, who, almost from the start, have been responding to 1 ! it, favourably, unfavourably, always helpfully'. This time readers ,1 : are being thanked here, at the beginning of the introduction, with , i ' no 'perhaps' about the 'most of all'. ! Reviewers of Words noticed the part readers had played in it. Mr D. J. Enright, in the Listener, wrote of the 'feeling of airiness and light' their letters brought 'to a physically small column of print'. Mr David Holloway, in the Daily Telegraph, said they gave 'a much more coherent shape to the book - a dialogue rather than a monologue'. What began as an optional, occasional light-hearted 'filler', intended to brighten the bottom of a page, has somehow converted itself, largely thanks to Observer readers, into a forum on usage, small in the numbers of people involved and the space in the paper it takes up, but not in range or learning. On matters that are out of my ken - the classics, say, or scientific matters or lexicography - I try to keep in touch with experts. Sometimes I get what they say wrong, or try to compress too much information into too confined a space. Distortion creeps in, if not downright error. On such occasions, as I prepare to wear a white sheet, I think wryly of how gratifying, if daunting, it is to have so informed a readership - see, for example, 'Celsius/Centigrade' and 'Egregious' in the following pages. (The American columnist William Safire also makes effective use of readers' letters in his book On Language, based on his column of the same title in the New York Times magazine. The book, which is wholly admirable, has sadly not been published in this country, but the column is syndicated in the New York Herald Tribune.) There is the ideal reader's letter. It makes a new point or develops one that I have made rather than just correcting me on something. It needs little or no editing. It is just long enough to