A Dictionary of Cont..

await 50
await. See anticipate.
awake; awaken. See wake.
award; reward. The verb award means to assign
or bestow according to adjudged merit. The
noun award means that which is so assigned
or bestowed. In its proper uses it is a lofty
and dignified word. When there is not sufficient
dignity in the gift or the judges, it is a
slightly pompous word better replaced by gift.
A reward is something given in recompense
for service. It is pay, compensation, or retribution
and punishment. (Honor is the reward of
virtue).
aware. See conscious.
awful; dreadful. Until recently these words both
meant inspiring respectful fear and both are
now used to mean very disagreeable, as in
that dreadful cat, that awful child. Some
people object to the second use of these words
but it is thoroughly established in American
speech today.
Technically, awful and dreadful are adjectives
and qualify nouns. But they are also used
as simple intensives before another adjective,
as in it came awful close and dreadful sorry,
Clementine. This use of dreadful is not standard
now, although dreadfully sorry is acceptable.
But some educated people still use awful
rather than awfully before an adjective. They
feel that this is the popular idiom and that,
since the purists will not forgive them for
using the word as an intensive anyway, there
is nothing to be gained by a compromise such
as awfully close. See adjectives as adverbs.
awoke; awaken. See wake.
axe to grind, to have an. A cliche and therefore
to be avoided and the more to be avoided
because, like so many cliches, it doesn’t have
a clear meaning.
In so far as it has a meaning, it implies a
hidden personal interest in a seemingly dis-
babe; baby. Baby is now the standard word,
though it is a diminutive of the former standard
word bnbe (and, behold, the babe wept-Exodus
2:6) which was itself, probably, a diminutive
of an earlier baban. When babe was the
standard word for child, baby, its diminutive,
often meant a doll. The two words seem continually
to be interchanging, as in modem slang.
Babe is still retained to imply innocence, guilelessness,
and simplicity (I know no more than a
babe unborn) and baby, as both a noun and a
verb, to denote an undesirable infantilism (He’s
a big baby. Don’t baby him). See also infant.
bacillus. The plural is bacilli.
B
interested proposal. But just how it came to
have even this much meaning is somewhat of
a mystery. Some (the Oxford English Dictionary
among them) attribute the origin of
the phrase to a story by Benjamin Franklin,
but Franklin’s story, of a man who wanted
his axe ground until the whole surface was as
bright as the edge and agreed to turn the
grindstone while the smith so ground it, carries,
rather, the moral of “Don’t bite off more
than you can chew.” More reliably the phrase
has been traced to Charles Miner’s Who’ll
Turn the Grindstone? In this anecdote, first
published in 1810, a boy is flattered into turning
the grindstone while a stranger sharpens
his axe. The boy finds the task much harder
than he thought it would be and is dismissed
at its conclusion not with thanks but with a
threat that he’d better not be late to school.
But here, again, there is no suggestion of a
hidden private interest in an apparently altruistic
suggestion. The stranger makes his intention
plain from the beginning. If the story
has a moral it is, “Don’t expect gratitude just
because you work hard.”
The saying probably lingers on because it
isn’t understood. It has an earthy, rustic flavor.
The user appears to be a son of toil and the
soil and the poor listener daren’t ask “What
does that mean?”
ixiom. See commonplace.
axis. The plural is axes.
ty; aye or aye; ay. The two adverbs, one meaning
always, continually, at all times (And aye
she sighed) and the other yes (Aye, ‘tis true),
are pronounced differently though each is
spelled either way. Aye meaning “always” is
pronounced like the a in race. Aye meaning
“yes” is pronounced like the i in mice.
Aye in the sense of “yes” is also a noun (The
ayes have it).
back formation is a term used in grammar to describe
the formation of a word from one that
looks like its derivative or to describe any word
so formed. The verb to typewrite was so formed
from typewriter. Peddler is a classic example.
Usually in English an agent noun is formed by
adding the suffix -er (or -or or -ar) to the verb
stem, as builder from build and singer from sing.
But in the case of peddler the noun existed first
and the verb to peddle was formed from the
noun. Sometimes (as in the singular Chinee) the
irregularity of the word is felt and it is not used
seriously, but many others have passed into
standard usage (as pea from Pease and diagnose