A Dictionary of Cont..

gymnasium
any wriier of English since the Elizabethan age,
uttered a wild cry of anguish, in Of Time and
the River, at the stupefying use of this “terrible
gray abortion of a word” which even then
studded the speech of common men “with the
numberless monotony of paving brick.” “Without
it,” he wailed, “they would have been
completely speechless and would have had to
communicate by convulsions of their arms and
hands and painful creakings from their tongueless
throats--the word fell upon the spirit of the
i&ener with the gray weariness of a cold inces-
haberdashery. Among the Canterbury pilgrims
there was a haberdasher. Just suddenly, like
Venus from the sea foam, he appeared fully
formed. But where he came from and whence
he got his name, no one knows. Chaucer apparently
assumed that the word was well known
and does not expatiate upon it. The haberdasher
tells no tale and does not appear after a mention
in the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. Some
among the learned have connected the word
with the French avoirdupois. Others have connected
it with hapertas, a width of cloth. But no
one knows for sure. Even today there is uncertainty.
In England a haberdasher sells what in
the United States would be called notionsthread,
needles, buttons, ribbons, and tape. In
America he sells men’s furnishings-shirts, collars,
ties, hats, gloves, and underwear. Haberdashery
is what a haberdasher sells and the shop
in which he sells it.
habit. See custom.
habitable; inhabitable. Habitable applies chiefly
to buildings or living spaces for human beings
(The house was so overrun with rats as to be no
longer habitable). Inhabitable refers to areas
or countries in which men or animals can establish
settled residence (Crusoe was relieved to
find that the island was inhabitable. All evidence
suggests that life as we know it could not inhabit
any of the planets except our own).
The older meaning of inhabitable, by the way,
was uninhabitable (Jove has the Realms of Earth
in vain / Divided by th’ inhabitable Main. The
land was inhabitable because of the sterility and
barrenness thereof). This meaning is now obsolete,
but it illustrates the pitfalls that await the
unwary reader.
habitual. See usual.
hackneyed. See commonplace.
had. See have.
hail; hale. To hail is to call or shout from a distance
in order to attract attention (I hailed a taxi
and ordered the driver to take me at once to the
airport). To hale is to haul, to pull, draw, constrain
to go along (Witnesses to the accident
212
sant drizzle, it flowed across the spirit like a river
of concrete; hope, joy, the power to feel and
think were drowned out under the relentless and
pitiless aridity of its flood.”
gymnasium. The plural is gymnasiums or gymnasia.
gypsy; gipsy. The preference in America is for
gypsy. In England it is for gipsy. The word
should be capitalized whenever the people or the
language is &ant (The old Gypsy uttered the
usual gypsy’s warning). The plural is Gypsies or
Gipsies.
hailed a policeman who haled the drunken driver
into court).
To hail from, to come from (Our passengers
hailed from fifteen states), is standard, though
it now has an old-fashioned and slightly rustic
flavor.
hale and hearty. Hale means healthy, vigorous,
robust. By usage it has come to be attached to
the old. One never hears a young person, however
healthy, spoken of as hale. Hale and hearty
is one of those alliterative reduplications which
so easily become clichCs and this one has not
escaped the general fate. Hearty originally meant
courageous and the phrase may once have signified
health in mind and body, but all precise
meaning has long ago been drained out of it by
repetition.
half. The plural is usually halves, but halfs is also
used. Half may be treated as a noun or as an
adjective or as a compromise between the two.
It is a noun when it stands alone, as in divide it
in halves, and when it is followed by of and another
noun that is qualified by a definitive adjective
(such as a, the, this, my, some) as in half
of the world, half of my apple. It is an adjective
when it stands immediately before another noun,
as in a half hour, a half apple. When used with
a pronoun, half must always be treated as a
noun and followed by of, as in half of us, half of
if. But when used with a noun, this of may be
dropped, as in half an apple, half a league onward.
This is an unusual word order, but the
construction has been standard English for at
least a thousand years. As a rule it makes no
difference where the word half stands. Half a
league is a half league.
When used as an adjective, half may qualify
either a singular or a plural noun. Whether a
following verb is singular or plural depends upon
the noun, as in half the apples are bad, half
the apple is bad. The singular form half standing
alone may also be followed by a plural verb
when it refers to a number of countable things,
as in half are finished.
Half may be used as an adverb to qualify a