IN A WORD: A Dictionary of Words...

IN A WORD: A Dictionary of Words That Don’t Exist But Ought To edited by Jack Hitt (Dell: $10.). Hitt notes in his introduction that unlike French, “American English is less a tended garden than it is a junkyard of other cultures’ castaways, imports, neologisms and jargon.” The editors at Harper’s magazine canvassed more than a dozen artists and writers for possible additions to the language. Among the notable suggestions: prignant : false pride in an intellectual failing (“I never was any good at math”); and fawnetics, “simpering, insincere prose meant to suggest politeness.” However, the most needed word in this election year must be poet Elton Glaser’s antisemantic : “of or pertaining to statements whose deliberate purpose is to mean nothing while sounding as if they express a significant point.”