MOSH! BORK!

By Jesse Birnbaum

The English language is alive and ill. The very quality that enriches the vocabulary--its undiscriminating tolerance for the new--obliges dictionary editors to acknowledge such a gallimaufry of new words and phrases that even the most casual browser wants to cry havoc.

Still, dictionaries must face factoids. So, with due sensitivity, the handsome new Random House Compact Unabridged Dictionary (2,230 pages; $50), a revised edition of the 1967 family-size version, quarantines about 1,000 examples of jargon, fad words and lamentable journalese and corrals them into a separate "Addenda Section."

The Addenda provides a useful glimpse into the netherworld of post-contemporary wordsmithery. Control freak is here, as are dream team, deadbeat dad, drive-by (shooting), granny dumping, latte, managed care, mosh pit, outsource (but not downsize) and wellness.

To bork is to attack a public figure systematically (thus immortalized is the hapless Judge Robert Bork). Calculus is not only a field of mathematics but also an all-purpose reckoning ("the calculus of political appeal"). To incentivize is to encourage. The inner child is the infantile wretch that lurks within the adult psyche. Outercourse is sex without penetration. Tattered cliches like reality-based, reality check and wake-up call, alas, refuse to die.

Beyond the dread Addenda, the dictionary is sound and scholarly, comprising more than 315,000 entries (1,500 of them updated), with etymologies aplenty, regional variations and usage guides. A selection of well-known names, places and events is even catalogued handily in the main text. Dictionary lovers should find the contents illuminating, despite depressing evidence that the English language is getting a severe dumbing down. That term, oddly enough, is not to be found in these pages. --By Jesse Birnbaum