The Mot Juste

By LANCE MORROW

BERNSTEIN'S REVERSE DICTIONARY by THEODORE M. BERNSTEIN 277 pages. Quadrangle. $10.

One evening Theodore Bernstein, consulting editor of the New York Times and for years its linguistic policeman, was trying to think of the term for a sentence or word that reads the same both backward and forward, as in "Madam, I'm Adam." It came to him the next morning (palindrome), and with it the inspiration for this book--a reverse dictionary that alphabetically lists an array of meanings and then retrieves the word that has momentarily disappeared into the outer fog banks of the brain.

The reader vaguely recalls a lovely term for a mirage--something Italianate. He checks Bernstein under "mirage, especially as observed in the Strait of Messina" and finds fata morgana. "Midget or dwarf leads to homunculus. "Ecstasy of a religious nature" brings forth theopathy. "Misstroke or misplay" discovers foozle. And so on.

Body Stealer. There is some padding in the 13,390 entries. Is anyone likely to misplace humid or fervent or dawdle? Bernstein includes some delightful, half-remembered curios--a body stealer, for example, is a resurrectionist. But where is mooncalf? Where is poshlust? Sometimes the clue words are elusive. If one goes hunting for callipygian, he cannot look under "buttocks, rounded" or some such, but must hit "shapely buttocks" or "beautiful buttocks." ("Buttocks that are fat" yields steatopygia--which is a different matter altogether.) Bernstein's backward dictionary is a kind of combination thesaurus and crossword-puzzle dictionary. It gives only the "target" words, not their pronunciations and derivations. For moments of verbal parapraxis the deipnosophist seeking just the mot juste (ulotrichous? schlep?) may wish to keep it handy. Too frequent a reliance on the book, however, may have the reader sounding like William F. Buckley.

Lance Morrow

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