Mcm-in-the-Street's Dictionary

Hearing: a physical sense with a particular type of terminal organ responsible to a particular type of stimulus.

Such examples of dictionary style make Columbia University's famed Psychologist Edward Lee Thorndike wince. No pedant, Dr. Thorndike decided a few years ago to write a dictionary that most of its users could understand. He started by counting words to see which were used oftenest. Then his assistant, Dr. Irving Lorge, made a record of how the words were used, compiled an English semantic count which ranked each word's meanings in order of frequency. To give his dictionary authority, Dr. Thorndike employed 28 eminent scholars as consultants.

Having warmed up for the big job by publishing a Junior Dictionary for children in 1935, Dr. Thorndike produced his masterpiece, the Thorndike-Century Senior Dictionary (Scott, Foresman & Co., Chicago; $2.48), on sale last week. It was billed as a dictionary for youths aged 12-to-20, actually was intended for grownups as well.

Dr. Thorndike's dictionary boiled down the English language to some 50,000 words (the Oxford English Dictionary has 414,825), claimed that it would tell even a college-educated person what he needed to know 999 times out of 1,000. Illustrated with drawings and some 15,000 sentences showing how words are used, the dictionary is simple, easy to use. Handiest short cut: an inverted e (a), called the schwa (from Hebrew), takes the place of eight symbols customarily used to represent the same sound--the unaccented vowel in about, pencil, lemon, etc. On his definition of hearing Dr. Thorndike wasted no big words: "Sense by which sound is perceived. The old man's hearing is poor."

The dictionary contains many a recent coinage (e.g., "Blitzkrieg: warfare in which the offensive is extremely rapid, violent, and hard to resist; totalitarian: of or having to do with a government controlled by one political group that permits no other political groups"). But youths found that in some respects their dictionary shortchanges them. Conspicuously missing are such well-rooted youthful words as jitterbug, jive.

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