Random House Webster's College Dictionary
Reviewed by Cindy Widner, Fri., Aug. 25, 2000
Random House Webster's College Dictionary
edited by Wendalyn Nichols
Random House, 1,573 pp., $24.95
For your average dictionary obsessive, it's all about hyphens and slang. Poets, professors, and those with an appetite for deconstruction prefer the OED, with its fancy-schmancy pronunciation symbols and legendary etymological discourse. Free-thinkers and minimalists opt for American Heritage, scanty of appendix, reticent about prefixes, and in general leaving much to the imagination. But hyphens and slang are the realm of the middlebrow, perfect focal points for the frequent dictionary user who really, really wants to know the "right" answer to even the most malleable of linguistic queries ("anti-theft" or "antitheft"? "webcasting" or "Webcasting"?). Random House Webster's College Dictionary trucks this territory with gusto, offering up pages of opinions on the hyphenation of suffixes, prefixes, and compound modifiers. No term seems too fleeting ("keypal" -- how long is that one gonna be around?) and no hyphenate too obscure for inclusion, although accuracy falters at times (the definition of "slacker" credits Richard Linklater's "Slackers," plural, with popularizing the term). RHWCD also takes much pride in its inclusion of many, many slurs, along with instructions leaving no doubt as to just how offensive they are; an appendix titled "Avoiding Insensitive and Offensive Language" is also included. One supposes that this curious (if well-meaning) paternalism is a last-ditch attempt to sensitize the dictionary's presumably collegiate audience, although if you arrive at university convinced that being a big old-fashioned meanie makes you a rebel, it's probably too late.
