I also wanted to share vicariously in the achievement of my friend, Geof Huth, who had gotten 22 entries into the thing. Needless to say, I loved almost all of Geof's words. Perhaps my favorite was."adead," which combines the meanings of "alive" and "dead," as in the following illustration from the book: "The numbers of adead Americans continue to swell: from John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe to James Dean and Elvis, many of the dead continue to live active if unproductive lives long after their interment."

There were many other coinages I liked: for example, Robert Alter's "correctnik" for the kind of person who automatically takes offense at any display of political incorrectness, such as the use of the word, "chairman" in place of the far better term, "chairperdaughter" (a coinage of Mark J. Estren's which is also in the book); Roger C. Schank's "creactive," for describing someone who not only has great ideas but is able to realize, or activate, them; and Edward Silver's "self-unemployed."

Although the bulk of the book's entries seem intended primarily for amusement, there are a few serious ones, such as Geof Huth's "pwoermd" and "approceive." The first of these is his name for one-word poems, which are slowly coming into prominence in the more exploratory precincts of poetry; the second, which has to do with appreciating a work of art in full, is a needed term for the sort of "multiple intake" that a person must use to both hear and verbally understand opera, for instance, or to both read and see visual poetry.

Sadly for my numerous fans In A Word contains none of my (Very Serious) neologies--such as "lexicuum," my term for LEXIcal vaCUUM, which the alert reader has no doubt noticed above and wondered about. Nor does the book even consider the many other blanks in the language that I've tried with even greater brilliance to augment with words like "aesthcipient," "illumagery" and "pluraesthetic." I'm confident that Jack Hitt, the editor of In a Word, will take care of these oversights in the next edition, however.

A lesser flaw of In a Word is its being essentially an alphabetized list, which reduces it to a browser's book. I would have liked it to have included some ongoing disucussion of such questions as how chemist Paul Bickart, with 25 entries, became such a lexicomaniac; why the most dedicated word-coiners, tend to be male; and why certain neologies like Lewis Carroll's "chortle" and John Milton's "pandemonium" stick, and others don't.

Despite my quibbles, though, I had a good time with In a Word. Its plusses, which include a fine introduction by Hitt, substantially outweigh its shortcomings. I heartily recommend it to anyone who finds the English language even half as fascinating as I do.