Tony Deverson & Graeme Kennedy: The New Zealand Oxford Dictionary

Why do so many people get so excited about the correct — not to say pedantic — use of English? A book on grammar, and particularly punctuation, was outselling Harry Potter in Britain recently, confounding publishers and booksellers.

The answer may be a hangover from the time when a person's class and education could be fairly accurately measured by the grammatical correctness and carefully attuned pronunciation. In England, for example, an arbitrary standard was established deliberately to flush out ignorant and lowly born usurpers to high society. Hence George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion.

Many people still cling to the vestiges of what they were told at school was correct, rule-book grammar to demonstrate their superiority over those they may consider less well-educated. Bad speech, after all, is one stamp of personality that is difficult to hide, whereas my relative innumeracy is easily obscured.

The time has come to take a more forgiving attitude towards minor grammatical solecisms as they are endorsed as genuine expression by repeated common use.

Well, help is at hand. Those who hold clarity and felicity of expression above the gentrification of language have a new ally in the lexico-graphers who have put together the New Zealand Oxford Dictionary, the largest and most detailed version yet of our particular language. It carries 100,000 headwords, including more than 10,000 of special interest to New Zealanders.

The work is a product of the New Zealand Dictionary Centre, which is associated with Victoria University of Wellington and Oxford University Press, and is in the proud tradition of the late Harry Orsman, editor of the Dictionary of New Zealand English, a historical collection that won the Montana non-fiction Book of the Year award at six years ago.

The New Zealandisms in that work are included in this new dictionary, with many more recent ones added. Rich and wonderful terms like (see "like", later in this review) dog-tucker, home and hosed, rattle your dags, and throw a wobbly, are there, supplemented by the newer perk-buster, munted, go upstairs (as in rugby) and others.

Included are a growing number of Maori words that have an increasing presence in the wider New Zealand vocabulary. Among them: waka, waka-jumper, whanau, hikoi and koha.

Oxford University Press long ago shed its reputation for being conservative, rejecting words until they had been around long enough to establish an acknowledged niche in the language. Nowadays so many neologisms spring at us through mass media, it is impossible to ignore them, and also to ignore the shifts in meaning that use brings so quickly to words. As a result this dictionary is up-to-date, inclusive, with a nice balance between scholarship and accessibility, and without too stern an attitude towards what it considers marginally improper use.

For the tone of the book, I went first to see how the editors reacted to "like", a word on which so many pedants hang so much sanctimony. I used to get more letters when I used "like" instead of "such as" than I received in response to any other breach of the hallowed rule book. The dictionary passes the test: "1b. resembling in some ways, such as; in the same class as (good writers like Dickens)."

It follows with a break-out on use: "When like means such as, some people prefer such as to be used in formal contexts when more than one example is mentioned, e.g. good writer such as Dickens, Shakespeare and Hardy." Nothing dictatorial about that.

And then there's "like" as a kind of spoken comma, which exasperates so many purists. The dictionary responds non-judgmentally to this also: "colloq. so to speak (also used as a filter of little or no meaning) (did a quick getaway, like; as I said, like, I'm no Shakespeare)."

People who hate this often use filters of their own: you know, um, sort of thing. The problem I have with "like" in this sense is not its use but the merciless repetition that some speakers inflict upon us: "I said, like, that it was, like, pretty, like, stupid."

I heard a prize-winner on television a while ago say: "It's great, like, I'm stoked." Succinctly put, I thought. Stoked, by the way, is on a drug rehabilitation programme, as the dictionary obliquely notes: "3. (as stoked adj.) colloq. a affected by alcohol or drugs. b (often foll. by on) thrilled; excited; elated by (is really stoked on surfing)."

So the editors seem to have their ears attuned to what's happening to language on the streets, in bars and in living-rooms where the real decisions on semantics are made, but are not beyond caution before full acceptance.

This is also an encyclopaedic dictionary with biographical entries on substantially famous contemporary and historical New Zealanders and international figures (not celebrities), and brief notes on towns, cities and geographical features as well as historical events such as Think Big.

The Dictionary Centre appears to have delivered on its promise of a carefully compiled and controlled database, a resource that will hopefully lead to a number of specialised reference works of the type published by Oxford in most other parts of the world where it operates.

So the dictionary seems, on short acquaintance, to be expansive, balanced and sensible, and is the first dictionary that fills the full role on its own and is not just a secondary volume for New Zealanders to a larger general dictionary.

* Gordon McLauchlan is a Herald columnist

* Oxford University Press, $110