词汇大师(Wordmaster)--Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictio

Broadcast on COAST TO COAST: July 10, 2003

AA: I'm Avi Arditti, Rosanne Skirble is away. This week on WORDMASTER -- a look at some of the ten-thousand new words and meanings in a popular American dictionary.

Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary contains two-hundred-twenty-five-thousand definitions, if anyone's counting. It's updated yearly, but every ten years it goes through a major revision.

Editors read through all sorts of publications to find material for the eleventh-edition Collegiate. They made sure people really use terms like "supermom." That's defined as "an exemplary mother, also a woman who performs the traditional duties of housekeeping and child-rearing while also having a full-time¹ job."

But when it comes to language, it's technology that cooks up lots of new vocabulary. "Pop-up," an old term, can now refer to advertisements that pop up on Web sites. There's "drag-and-drop" -- that's what you do when you pull a computer file across the screen.

There's also "PDA," or personal digital assistant. As associate editor Tom Pitoniak explains, this refers to a small handheld device that's used especially to store and organize personal information, such as addresses, schedules and notes.

PITONIAK: "With PDA, one thing that comes to mind there is really, it's a wireless² device. These aren't just Internet, per se. When you really talk about a convergence -- which itself is one of the words that's developed a new sense -- you see that all of these things are intersecting to some extent. 'Convergence' is worth mentioning -- the merging³ of distinct technologies, industries or devices into a unified⁴ whole -- and really that's happened naturally with this eleventh edition, because when you buy the dictionary you also get a CD-ROM and a year's subscription⁵ to the Collegiate Web site."

AA: "And what about, moving away from technology, since there are so many terms, what about other terms, from popular culture, or from -- what are some interesting words that leap off the pages?"

PITONIAK: "I think some might be words like 'air rage' or 'supermom.'"

AA: "'Air rage' is what exactly?"

PITONIAK: "It's basically a behavior -- if you know 'road rage,' it's basically similar behavior in the air, passengers going berserk. Others would be 'supermodel,' is another one."

AA: "Meaning a really high-paid model for clothing and fashion."

PITONIAK: "'Dead presidents' -- slang for U.S. money in the form of bills."

AA: "That's because our banknotes have pictures of dead presidents, old presidents on them."

PITONIAK: "Exactly. We've also tried to include a lot of expanded coverage⁶ of phrases, because one thing we've been able to see from our Web site is that people want to know what phrases mean, and this is true of English language learners as well. So you'll see phrases like 'connect the dots.'"

AA: "Which means?"

PITONIAK: "To link some things together logically. Or to 'look daggers⁷' at someone -- to look with sort of an aggressive or mean face. Or something that's a 'done deal,' been resolved."

AA: "Let me ask you one last question here. Now to make room for some of these new words, I'm assuming you've had to take some older words out of the Collegiate. What are a couple of those words that you said goodbye to?"

PITONIAK: "A couple would be 'record-changer,' for the old machines that played the vinyl LP's and put one on after the other. 'Portapak' was a combined videotape recorder and camera. And one that I'll just mention, too, quickly -- 'ten-cent store.' You wonder if there's a little bit of inflation going on there, since nowadays at least around here there's some discount stores called 'family dollar' or 'dollar value.' So you wonder if forty years from now we'll have 'dollar store' in there or it'll be coming out."

AA: Tom Pitoniak is an associate editor at Merriam-Webster, in Springfield, Massachusetts, publishers of the new 11th Edition of the Collegiate Dictionary.

By the way, several companies use the name Webster on dictionaries. But Merriam-Webster actually traces its history back to the work of Noah Webster, publisher in 1806 of -- in the company's proud words -- "the first truly American dictionary."

And that's Wordmaster for this week. Our e-mail address is [email protected]. And look us up on the Web at voanews.com/wordmaster. I'm Avi Arditti.

MUSIC: "Make Yourself Comfortable"/Andy Griffith with Jean Wilson 1955

1 full-time   

adj.满工作日的或工作周的，全时间的

参考例句：

• A full-time job may be too much for her.全天工作她恐怕吃不消。
• I don't know how she copes with looking after her family and doing a full-time job.既要照顾家庭又要全天工作，我不知道她是如何对付的。

2 wireless   

adj.无线的；n.无线电

参考例句：

• There are a lot of wireless links in a radio.收音机里有许多无线电线路。
• Wireless messages tell us that the ship was sinking.无线电报告知我们那艘船正在下沉。

3 merging   

合并（分类）

参考例句：

• Many companies continued to grow by merging with or buying competing firms. 许多公司通过合并或收买竞争对手的公司而不断扩大。 来自英汉非文学 - 政府文件
• To sequence by repeated splitting and merging. 用反复分开和合并的方法进行的排序。

4 unified   

(unify 的过去式和过去分词)； 统一的； 统一标准的； 一元化的

参考例句：

• The teacher unified the answer of her pupil with hers. 老师核对了学生的答案。
• The First Emperor of Qin unified China in 221 B.C. 秦始皇于公元前221年统一中国。

5 subscription   

n.预订，预订费，亲笔签名，调配法，下标（处方）

参考例句：

• We paid a subscription of 5 pounds yearly.我们按年度缴纳5英镑的订阅费。
• Subscription selling bloomed splendidly.订阅销售量激增。

6 coverage   

n.报导，保险范围，保险额，范围，覆盖

参考例句：

• There's little coverage of foreign news in the newspaper.报纸上几乎没有国外新闻报道。
• This is an insurance policy with extensive coverage.这是一项承保范围广泛的保险。

7 daggers   

匕首，短剑( dagger的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• I will speak daggers to her, but use none. 我要用利剑一样的话刺痛她的心，但绝不是真用利剑。
• The world lives at daggers drawn in a cold war. 世界在冷战中剑拨弩张。