Erudite (p. 88)! Didactic (p. 127)!

My friend John died last year. John and I had a common past: we both had grown up as part of a transitional generation: our mothers came from immigrant families, eager to cement their children into the middle class. Both mothers stood as testimonials to an important but now-forgotten landmark in American public life: they got first-class educations from the public school systems in the first part of the 20^th Century.

No surprise, then, that both of us came to adolescence, equipped with copies of Funk and Lewis, Thirty Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary, necessary baggage in its time on the road to respectability.

My own original copy is long gone, but lately I stumbled across what must be the mate of it—a Yellow/Black/Red paperback edition, from Pocket Books, Inc., 6^th Printing, 1950 (no cover price, but I bet it was 25 cents).

One of the charms of this neglected masterpiece is its strategy of compare/contrast. On pp. 50-51, we have “patriot/chauvinist/jingoist”—only patriot familiar to me, I suspect, when I first ran across this triplet at the age of 13. A few pages later, we have some words on Greek roots: so “misanthropy,” which I think I knew (it comes up under both MISO and ANTHROPO)—but I don’t suppose I had hitherto encountered “misogamy” or “misogynist.” My vanity was particularly tickled by “Words for Mature Minds,” where I found “vicarious,” “maudlin,” “effete” and “obsequious”—that last a rude shock to me, because I thought I knew it before: I had misread it as “obesequious,,” and assumed it meant “very, very fat.”

I’m pretty sure I never finished the entire book, but perhaps that is a pattern: the previous owner of my new copy finished the exercises only through page 90 (item 11, “habitually silent or reserved”—the anonymous hand had answered “taciturn”-- for full credit). Probably all for the best: whatever I learned was no more than a mixed blessing—I’m sure I made a perfect nuisance of myself for years as I scrolled through the files of my overstocked memory—surely a display of “pomposity” (pp. 88-95), not to say “pedantry” (p. 66) par excellence (p. 164).

Fn: Somewhat to my astonishment, I find it is still available at Amazon (link)—a “reissue edition” from 1991, so I infer (but cannot be sure) that it is revised from my childhood. Over 4 million copies in print, the promos boast, a respectable 13,552 in Amazon sales. I wonder who it is that reads it now, flattering their vanity and tickling their imagination and struggling for respectability as John and I did so many years ago?