| 词组 | compendious |
| 释义 | compendious In 1806 Noah Webster published A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. Its vocabulary runs to 355 pages, and, when back matter and front matter are added in, the book amounts to more than 400 pages. It is not a slim volume. What is most noticeable about the book is that most of its 37,000 words are defined in a single line each. The Compendious Dictionary is tightly packed and its definitions are concise; it illustrates the definition of compendious that is found in Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary: "marked by brief expression of a comprehensive matter." Compendious has another salient characteristic: it sounds big. Many people, when they first read or hear the word, get the notion that it means "big and comprehensive" or simply "comprehensive." Probably most of them have to learn that it is also supposed to connote conciseness, compactness, brevity. Some never do learn this, and thus usage writers gain another topic for discussion. And here is where the trouble begins. Evans 1957 says that the word "means concise, or containing the substance of a subject in brief form " His definition adequately covers Noah Webster's title and uses like this: • For readers too anemic to face up to the 868 double-column pages ... Twitchell gives a compendious summary in an appendix —S. Schoenbaum, N.Y. Rev. of Books, 30 Jan. 1986 But Evans goes on to say "A compendious work may be large or small, but its compendiousness has nothing to do with its size." Now let us assume he is right. Let us further suppose that a reader to whom the word is unfamiliar sees this passage: • Goold Brown ... in his compendious, and bulky, Grammar of English Grammars —Julia P. Stanley, College English, March 1978 If Evans is right, this book can be both compendious in its treatment and bulky in size. But how can the reader know that Goold Brown has treated his matter concisely? There is no way, unless he or she is already familiar with the book. The natural inclination of the reader seeing compendious linked with bulky is to think of comprehensiveness. And to judge from our evidence, comprehensiveness is the usual connotation that readers pick up and, apparently, is also what writers intend. Our evidence runs from 1798 to 1986. In our earliest example, Jane Austen is commenting on a one-sentence description: • A short and compendious history of Miss Debarry! —letter, 25 Nov. 1798 The combining of short with compendious suggests that comprehensiveness was in Miss Austen's mind. She is not the only writer to use the combination: • Such looseness cannot be afforded in a short and compendious book —Times Literary Supp., 1 Dec. 1951 In this second example, the writer may have been following Evans's definition, but the reader has no way of knowing it for certain. And the same may be said for a few of the following examples. But we believe that not only is comprehensiveness the connotation the reader will take from these examples, it is in most cases clearly what the writer had in mind too: • Scott's "Specialized Catalogue of United States Stamps" for 1975, the 53d edition of this work, has now become available, a little bit later than in other years, but not a bit less compendious or useful to the collector —Samuel A. Tower, N. Y. Times, 23 Feb. 1975 • ... offered a most diversified and compendious program at the APA meetings —The Americana Annual 1953 • ... Miss Mainwaring's achievement is, so far as my fairly compendious memory stretches, unmatched —Anthony Boucher, N. Y. Times Book Rev., 15 Aug. 1954 • In times of violent action and rapid change, compendious treatises of political philosophy can scarcely be expected —W. L. Renwick, English Literature 1789-1815, 1963 • As for the writing of our more extreme, compendious, sociological novelists —Glenway Wescott, Images of Truth, 1962 • ... his costumes, which are the fruit of a compendious knowledge —a reviewer, quoted in Current Biography, October 1964 • ... which stocks what must be one of the most compendious collections of jackknives in the known universe —Jay Jacobs, Gourmet, December 1982 • ... most of the texts I selected can also be found in either the Arndt or the Fennell, for their books are compendious, and there is bound to be some agreement on what is the best —D. M. Thomas, N.Y. Times Book Rev., 24 Oct. 1982 • It is doubtful that even the most compendious traditional or teaching grammar notes such simple facts —Noam Chomsky, Knowledge of Language, 1986 It appears to us that compendious tends to be generally understood as and frequently used for the "comprehensive" half of its older "concise and comprehensive" meaning. This understanding probably results from learning the word by reading it in contexts where, if Evans's analysis is correct, the "conciseness" half of its meaning can be ascertained only by acquaintance with the thing being described. Consequently, most of us are aware only of the "comprehensive" idea. Dictionaries have been slow to recognize this development, but they will inevitably have to do so. |
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