For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org wake1 (wak) v woke (wok) or rare waked (wakt), waked or chiefly British & regional woke or woken (wd'kgn), waking, wakes—intr a To cease to sleep; become awake; awaken Often used with up b To be brought into a state of awareness or alertness Regional To keep watch or guard, especially over a corpse To be or remain awake.—tr To rouse from sleep; awaken Often used with up To stir, as from a dormant or inactive condition; rouse: wake old animosities To make aware of; to alert Often used with to: It waked him to the facts Regional, a To keep a vigil over, b To hold a wake over.—n a A watch; vigil, b A watch over the body of a deceased person before burial, sometimes accompanied by festivity British A parish festival held annually, often in honor of the patron saint The condition of being awake: between wake and asleep [Middle English wakien and waken, Old English wacian, to be awake and wacan (unattested), to rouse See weg-2 in Appendix.*] For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org Main entry The superscript ' indicates that this is the first of at least two homographs, different words with the same spelling and pronunciation but different senses Pronunciation This is enclosed within parentheses and uses symbols and marks set out in a table at the beginning of the word list Part of speech v = verb (intr - intransitive and tr = transitive); n = noun Inflected forms For verbs these are the principal parts (For nouns they would be the singular and plural, for modifiers the comparative and superlative forms.) As listed in this dictionary the principal parts, set in boldface, include the past preterite (woke), the past participle (waked), the present participle (waking), and the third person singular active indicative present (wakes) Alternate forms are given for the past and past participle, with the less common following the more common and labeled as rare or chiefly British & regional (that is, confined to the speakers of a particular geographical area rather than common to all users of English) Definitions These are divided into the senses of the verb and of the noun The former, in turn, are distinguished for both the intransitive and transitive uses of the verb Within each category the various meanings are ordered, in this dictionary, beginning with the most common or central Different senses are marked by arabic numerals in boldface; subdivisions within a particular sense by lowercase letters in boldface Where useful, brief examples of a sense are given in italics Etymology The etymology, set within brackets, traces the origin of the modern word Foreign terms are italicized, and their meanings are in roman type without quotation marks "Unattested" means that no actual record of a form exists, though the form For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org 344 DICTION I Usage: The verbs wake, waken, awake, and awaken are alike in meaning but differentiated in usage Each has transitive and intransitive senses, but awake is used largely intransitively and waken transitively In the passive voice, awaken and waken are the more frequent: / was awakened (or wakened) by his call In figurative usage, awake and awaken are the more prevalent: He awoke to the danger; his suspicions were awakened Wake is frequently used with up; the others not take a preposition The preferred past participle of wake is waked, not woke or woken: When I had waked him, I discovered that the danger was past The preferred past participle of awake is awaked, not awoke: He had awaked several times earlier in the night wake2 (wak) n The visible track of turbulence left by something moving through the water: the wake of a ship The track or course left behind anything that has passed: "Every revolutionary law has naturally left in its wake defection, resentment, and counterrevolutionary sentiment." (C Wright Mills) —in the wake of Following directly upon In the aftermath of; as a consequence of [Probably Middle Low German wake, from Old Norse vok, a hole or crack in ice See wegw- in Appendix.*] Informative introductions to special dictionaries and reference works in general can be found in The Basic Guide to Research Sources, edited by Robert O'Brien and Joanne Soderman (New American Library, 1975), Reference Readiness: A Manual for Librarians and Students, second edition (Linnet Books, 1977), or A Guide to Library Research Methods, by Thomas Mann (Oxford University Press, 1987) Here we are interested only in one kind of special dictionary: the thesaurus or dictionary of synonyms Syno- For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org IMPROVING YOUR VOCABULARY: DICTIONARIES 345 may be inferred from other evidence, weg-2 refers to a list of Indo-European roots contained in an appendix following the word list (Indo-European is the name given to the mother language of English and most other Western languages, as well as of many in the Near East and India That language does not exist in any written record However, linguists can reconstruct many of its words or word elements, collectively called roots, from evidence in languages descended from Indo-European.) Usage A discussion of how the word and its various forms are actually used by contemporary speakers The discussion is illustrated by typical cases, printed in italics "Main entry of wake2 Wake2, a homograph of wake1, is a different word with a different meaning Quoted citation Rather than a typical example, this is an actual employment of the word, attributed to a specific writer It is an example of the kind of citation from which the dictionary maker works Collecting hundreds or thousands of such specific examples of a word, he or she frames the definition Idiom using the word nyms are words in the same language having much the same meaning True, or identical, synonyms have exactly the same definition and usually are simply alternative names for the same object In sailboats, for instance, mizzen and jigger signify the same sail and are true synonyms Most synonyms, however, are less than exact For example,/?**/ and friend overlap to a considerable degree, but are not exactly coextensive: any pal is a friend, but not any friend is a pal In listing synonyms a thesaurus necessarily obscures this distinction For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org 34 DICTION between exact and near synonyms To distinguish all shades of meaning would result in a vast work of many volumes, too expensive to buy and too cumbersome to use Roget's is probably the best known thesaurus (The word comes from Greek and means "treasure.") It was first published in 1852 by Mark Peter Roget, an American physician and professor, and entitled A Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition Roget devised a system of grouping words in numbered and subdivided categories of ideas Users searching for terms meaning, say, "friendship" could look under the appropriate category To make his book usable from the other direction— that is, from word to category—Roget also included an alphabetized index of words, each keyed to its category by the appropriate number Early in the twentieth century C O S Mawson simplified Roget's scheme Neither Roget nor thesaurus is copyrighted, and a number of Roget's are currently available—some revisions of Roget's original work, others of Mawson's modification, and still others consisting of alphabetical listings without Roget's categories Besides the various Roget's, there are other thesauri on the market: The Random House Thesaurus (Random House); Webster's Collegiate Thesaurus (G & C Merriam Company); Webster's New World Thesaurus, edited by Charlton Laird (World Publishing Company); and Webster's II Thesaurus (Simon and Schuster) (Like Roget, the name Webster is not copyrighted and is used by competing companies.) The limitations of most thesauri are revealed in the directions given in one edition of Roget: Turning to No 866 (the sense required) we read through the varied list of synonyms and select the most appropriate expression [Italics added] That matter of selection is critical, and a thesaurus does not offer much help For example, among the synonyms listed in For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org IMPROVING YOUR VOCABULARY: DICTIONARIES 347 one Roget under the category seclusion/exclusion are solitude, isolation, loneliness, and aloofness They are merely listed as alternates with no distinctions drawn, but, except in a very loose sense, these words are not synonymous and may not be interchanged indiscriminately Solitude means physical apartness, out of the sight and sound of others, a condition not necessarily undesirable; in fact, solitude may be used with positive connotations, as in "She enjoys solitude." Loneliness, on the other hand, has a more subjective significance, relating to the feeling of being apart; it does not necessarily imply physical separation—one can be lonely in a crowd of Christmas shoppers—and it would never be given a positive sense Isolation stresses physical separation, out of connection and communication with others, and is often used when that separation is not desired Aloofness, finally, is self-chosen separation, a deliberate withdrawal from others, which may suggest a sense of superiority, though it does not have to To use these "synonyms" effectively you need to know considerably more about them than a thesaurus is likely to tell you With many words—those in this example, for instance—a good abridged dictionary is more helpful That is not to say that a thesaurus is a waste of money Used wisely it can improve your working vocabulary It may remind you of a word you have forgotten, or acquaint you with a new one But before you employ that new word learn more about it A more useful source of synonyms is a work published by the G & C Merriam Company: Webster's Dictionary of Synonyms It discusses meaning at greater length than does the typical thesaurus For example, Webster's Collegiate Thesaurus uses about one inch of a column for solitude, the Dictionary of Synonyms spends more than seven inches, carefully distinguishing solitude from isolation, loneliness, and so on For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org P A R T VI Description and Narration For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org CHAPTER 30 Description Description is about sensory experience—how something looks, sounds, tastes Mostly it is about visual experience, but description also deals with other kinds of perception The following passage, for example, uses sounds to describe the beginning of an act of revolutionary violence in China: Five shots went off in a nearby street: three together, another, still another The silence returned, but it no longer seemed to be the same Suddenly it was filled by the clatter of horses' hoofs, hurried, coming nearer and nearer And, like the vertical laceration of lightning after a prolonged thunder, while they still saw nothing, a tumult suddenly filled the street, composed of mingled cries, shots, furious whinnyings, the falling of bodies; then, as the subsiding clamor was heavily choking under the indestructible silence, there rose a cry as of a dog howling lugubriously, cut short: a man with his throat slashed Andre Malraux Whatever sense it appeals to, descriptive writing is of two broad kinds: objective and subjective In objective description the writer sets aside those aspects of the perception unique to himself and concentrates on describing the percept (that is, what is perceived) in itself In subjective (also called impressionistic) description a writer projects his or her feelings into For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org 352 DESCRIPTION AND NARRATION the percept Objective description says, "This is how the thing is"; subjective, "This is how the thing seems to one particular consciousness." Neither kind of description is more "honest." Both are (or can be) true, but they are true in different ways The truth of objective description lies in its relationship to fact; that of subjective in relationship to feeling or evaluation The first kind of truth is more easily checked We can generally decide which of two passages more accurately describes, say, a downtown office building Subjective description, on the other hand, is "true" because it presents a valuable response, not because it makes an accurate report If we not agree with how a writer feels about something, we cannot say that the description is false We can say only that it is not true for us—that is, that we not share his or her feelings Nor are these two approaches hard-and-fast categories into which any piece of descriptive writing must fall Most descriptions involve both, in varying degrees Generally, however, one mode will dominate and fix the focus In scientific and legal writing, for instance, objectivity is desirable In personal writing subjectivity is more likely But in both kinds, success hinges on three things: (1) details that are sharply defined images, appealing to one or another of the senses; (2) details that are selected according to a guiding principle; (3) details that are clearly organized Objective Description Selection of Detail In objective description the principle which guides selection is the thing itself The writer must ask: Which details are essential to seeing and understanding this object, event, person, experience? Which are accidental and of lesser importance? Essential details should make up the bulk of the description, those of secondary importance being included as the writer has space The following description of a freshwater fish by an eigh- For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org DESCRIPTION 353 teenth-century naturalist exemplifies the selection of essential detail: The loach, in its general aspect, has a pellucid appearance: its back is mottled with irregular collections of small black dots, not reaching much below the linea lateralis, as are the back and tail fins: a black line runs from each eye down to the nose; its belly is of a silvery white; the upper jaw projects beyond the lower, and is surrounded with six feelers, three on each side; its pectoral fins are large, its ventral much smaller; the fin behind its anus small; its dorsal fin large, containing eight spines; its tail, where it joins the tail-fin, remarkably broad, without any taperness, so as to be characteristic of this genus; the tail-fin is broad, and square at the end From the breadth and muscular strength of the tail, it appears to be an active nimble fish Gilbert white White focuses on those features that enable us to recognize a loach: size and shape of tail and fins, number of feelers on each side of the jaw, and so on Scientific description like this is a kind of definition, differentiating an entity from others similar to it Organization of Details Objective description, especially the visual kind, often begins with a brief comprehensive view It then analyzes this image and presents each part in detail, following an organization inherent in the object Here, for instance, is a description of a lake in Maine: In shape the lake resembles a gently curving S, its long axis lying almost due north-south The shoreline is ringed by rocks of all sizes, from huge boulders to tiny pebbles—the detritus of the Ice Age Beyond the rocks the forest comes almost to the water's edge Mostly pine and hemlock, it contains a few hardwoods—maple, oak, birch Here and there an old pine, its roots washed nearly clean of support, leans crazily over the water, seeming about to topple at any instant But it never does; trees fall this way for years For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org 354 DESCRIPTION AND NARRATION First we view the lake in its entirety, as a hawk might see it Then we focus down and move progressively closer to shore We see the rocks immediately at the water's edge, then the forest, then the various kinds of trees, and finally the old pine leaning over the water The description, in short, is organized: it moves from general to particular, and it divides the visual experience of the lake into three parts—the lake as a whole, the shoreline, and the forest around To effect these changes in viewpoint, the writer does not waste time directing us He does not say, "As we leave the bird's-eye view and come down for a closer look, we observe that the shoreline is ringed with rocks." It is awkward and wordy to turn tour guide It is better to move about the object implicitly without holding the reader by the hand Doing this usually requires an impersonal and omniscient point of view: impersonal in the sense that the writer does not refer to himself or herself; omniscient in that nothing is hidden, and he or she can range with complete freedom—above, below, around the object, inside and out Readers will follow if the writer has clearly organized what they are supposed to see But he or she must organize Writers of good description not just "see." They analyze what they see and give it a pattern Taking a perception apart in order to put it together can be seen in the following sentence by Joseph Conrad, which describes a coastal view The angle of vision does not change as it did in the description of the lake, but there is a principle of organization: Beyond the sea wall there curves for miles in a vast and regular sweep the barren beach of shingle, with the village of Brenzett standing out darkly across the water, a spire in a clump of trees; and still further out the perpendicular column of a lighthouse, looking in the distance no bigger than a lead pencil, marks the vanishing point of the land Our view shifts from near to distant Our eyes move outward through a series of receding planes: the sea wall, the beach, For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org DESCRIPTION 355 the village with its spire and trees across the water, and the lighthouse in the offing Diction in Objective Description In objective description words are chosen for exactness of denotation, not for forcefulness of connotation Factual precision is what is most desired Gilbert White (page 254) says "six feelers, three on each side," not "several feelers." He carefully differentiates fins by concise technical names: "pectoral," "ventral," "dorsal." Scientific description like this is not easy to write Given enough time to observe and the training to know what to look for, anyone can compose a reasonably accurate description of a fish But it requires more care to compose a description that is accurate and at the same time forceful, interesting prose It is worth studying White's paragraph to observe how he organizes it and gives it vitality and movement by the short, direct clauses, constructed with just enough variety to avoid monotony Subjective Description When describing objectively, the writer is a kind of camera, recording precisely and impersonally When writing subjectively, he or she is no longer an impartial observer, but rather enters into what is perceived Point of view—in most cases— becomes personal; and words have overtones of value and feeling that color the perception These evaluations and feelings are as much a part of the description as the object itself In fact, more: they determine selection and organization Sometimes writers state impressions directly, as in this paragraph about an Englishwoman's reactions to the citizens of Moscow: I wandered about in the morning and looked at the streets and people All my visit I looked and looked at the people They seem For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org 356 DESCRIPTION AND NARRATION neither happier nor sadder than in the West, and neither more nor less worried than any town dweller (People in towns are always preoccupied "Have I missed the bus? Have I forgotten the potatoes? Can I get across the road?") But they appear stupid, what the French call abruti What they think? Perhaps they don't think very much, and yet they read enormously I never saw such a country of readers—people sitting on benches, in the metro, etc., all read books (magazines seem not to exist); on the trains they have lending libraries They are hideously ugly Except for a few young officers, I never saw a handsome man; there seem to be no beautiful women They have putty faces, like Malenkov It is nonsense to speak of Asiatics, Mongol Hordes and so on—the pretty little Tartar guards at Lenin's tomb were the only people I saw with nonEuropean Cast of features Nancy Mitford Fixing the Impression in Images While subjective description often states an impression directly, it cannot rest on abstract statement Feeling must be fixed in images, in details appealing to the senses Only details, emotionally charged, make the impression real No more dreary spectacle can be found on this earth than the whole of the "awful East," with its Whitechapel, Hoxton, Spitalfields, Bethnal Green, and Wapping to the East India Docks The colour of life is grey and drab Everything is helpless, hopeless, unrelieved, and dirty Bath tubs are a thing totally unknown, as mythical as the ambrosia of the gods The people themselves are dirty, while any attempt at cleanliness becomes howling farce, when it is not pitiful and tragic Strange, vagrant odours come drifting along the greasy wind, and the rain, when it falls, is more like grease than water from heaven The very cobblestones are scummed with grease Jack London London, writing in 1902, begins by telling us what impression the slums of London's east end make on him: "no more dreary spectacle"; "the colour of life is grey and drab"; "everything is helpless, hopeless, unrelieved, and dirty." But we don't experience the impression until he renders it in images: For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org DESCRIPTION 357 "vagrant odours," "greasy wind," "rain like grease," "cobblestones scummed with grease." You can see that details work differently in impressionistic description than in objective Connotations are more important, and diction is charged with emotion The writer wants to arouse in readers a response like his own But he must more than merely tell us how he feels He must re-create the scene in a significantly altered manner, including this detail and omitting that, exaggerating one image and underplaying another, and calling up compelling similes and metaphors In short, the perception must be refracted through the writer's consciousness It may emerge idealized, like a landscape by a romantic painter It may be distorted and made ugly, like a reflection in a funhouse mirror Idealization and distortion are perfectly legitimate The writer of subjective description signs no contract to deliver literal truth "Here," he or she says, "is how / see it." Yet the description may reveal a deeper truth than mere objective accuracy, and, like an artist's caricature, make plain a subtle reality To convey subjective truth, then, a writer must embody responses in the details of the scene Often, in fact, he or she relies exclusively upon such embodiment, making little or no statement of feeling and, instead, forcing the perception to speak for itself A simple case is catalogue description, in which the writer lists detail after detail, each contributing to a dominant impression The following paragraph is a good example (it describes an outdoor market on Decatur Street in New Orleans): The booths are Sicilian, with red peppers, draped with garlic, piled with fruit, trayed with vegetables, fresh and dried herbs A huge man, fat as Silenus, daintily binds bunches for soup, while his wife quarters cabbages, ties smaller bundles of thyme, parsley, green onions, small hot peppers and sweet pimentos to season gumbos Another Italian with white moustache, smiling fiercely from a tanned face, offers jars of green file powder, unground all-spice, pickled onions in vinegar Carts and trucks flank the sidewalk; one walks through crates of curled parsley, scallions piled with ice, For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org 358 DESCRIPTION AND NARRATION wagonloads of spinach with tender mauve stalks, moist baskets of crisp kale; sacks of white onions in oyster-white fishnet, pink onions in sacks of old rose; piles of eggplant with purple reflections, white garlic and long sea-green leeks with shredded roots, grey-white like witches' hair Boxes of artichokes fit their leaves into a complicated pattern Trucks from Happy Jack, Boothville, and Buras have unloaded their oranges; a long red truck is selling cabbages, green peppers, squashes long and curled like the trumpets of Jericho There is more than Jordaens profusion, an abundance more glittering in color than Pourbus A blue truck stands in sunlight, Negroes clambering over its sides, seven men in faded jeans, washing-blue overalls; the last is a mulatto in a sweater of pure sapphire A mangy cat steps across a roadway of crushed oranges and powdered oyster-shells John Peale Bishop Not only the individual details, but their very profusion convey vitality and abundance far more effectively than would any plain statement It is not possible to overestimate the importance of specificity to good description Look back at how carefully Bishop names colors While details in catalogue descriptions are generally chosen according to an underlying feeling or evaluation, the selection is less rigorous than in some other kinds of subjective description Thus Bishop includes the "mangy cat" and the "crushed oranges," even though these jar slightly with the attractiveness of the scene More often the writer "edits" the perception, using fewer details and only those conducive to the impression The novelist Thomas Wolfe, for example, draws this picture of an idealized, if modest, home: On the outskirts of a little town upon a rise of land that swept back from the railway there was a tidy little cottage of white boards, trimmed vividly with green blinds To one side of the house there was a garden neatly patterned with plots of growing vegetables, and an arbor for the grapes which ripened late in August Before the house there were three mighty oaks which sheltered it in their clean and massive shade in summer, and to the other side there was a border of gay flowers The whole place had an air of tidiness, thrift, and modest comfort  ... DICTION between exact and near synonyms To distinguish all shades of meaning would result in a vast work of many volumes, too expensive to buy and too cumbersome to use Roget''s is probably the best... organized: it moves from general to particular, and it divides the visual experience of the lake into three parts—the lake as a whole, the shoreline, and the forest around To effect these changes in... concise technical names: "pectoral," "ventral," "dorsal." Scientific description like this is not easy to write Given enough time to observe and the training to know what to look for, anyone can compose