Remembering Laurence Urdang
Although you may not immediately recognize the name, odds are good that you have dipped into at least one of Laurence Urdang's reference books. After all, before his death last week at age 81, he had edited well over 100 of them--including the first editions of both the Random House Dictionary of the English Language in the US and Collins English Dictionary in the UK.
Other books edited by Urdang include The New York Times Dictionary of Misunderstood, Misused, Mispronounced Words (1972), The Synonym Finder (1978), Idioms and Phrases Index (1983), The Whole Ball of Wax and Other Colloquial Phrases (1988), The Bantam Medical Dictionary (1994), and The American Century Thesaurus (1996). His most recent work was a collection of essays, appropriately titled The Last Word: The English Language, Opinions and Prejudices (2007).
In 1974, Urdang founded the language lover's newsletter Verbatim, which he edited for 23 years. "I thought I should prepare a newsletter on all aspects of language," he told Nathan Bierma of the Chicago Tribune in 2005. "Something that would cater to the interests of people who were interested in language certainly above the level of William Safire, but not at the level of the Linguistics Society of America." It was an apt description of the audience he imagined for almost all his works.
Not long ago, after undergoing a triple bypass at Yale-New Haven Hospital, Urdang awoke from the anesthetic with a nurse by each arm. Into his right ear, one was saying, "Mr. Urdang, wake up. Say something, Mr. Urdang."
"What do you want me to say?" he asked.
"Say anything, but say a sentence," she said.
Without missing a beat he replied, "That was a sentence."
More About Editors and Editing:
- Top 10 Reference Works for Writers and Editors
- "The Editor of the Breakfast Table," by Charles J. Shields
- Harold Ross on Editing
- Lillian Ross on Helpful Editors
Image: The New York Times Dictionary of Misunderstood, Misused, Mispronounced Words, edited by Laurence Urdang, 1972; reprinted by Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2002
Comments
Regarding cummings’s 1)a:
You probably wanted to confine your remarks spatially, but I was surprised that as part of visual metaphor you didn’t discuss the fact that this is a concrete poem shaped to resemble the digit representing one. Cummings is on record as having said that the poem “doesn’t work any more” since typewriters and computers have stopped using the lower-case el for the number.
I’m also convinced that he thought of those parentheses as images of a falling leaf. The (
is the early leaf image; the ) further down is the fallling leaf haviing spun in its descent.
I’ve written extensively about this poem and others in which e.e.plays games with punctuation marks, makes buttocks or breasts out of the letter B, etc. But I won’t bother with it here.