All the following texts are taken from the New York Times. Copyright The New York Times Company. All rights reserved.

Teaching the Unteachable. Learn how to write

The Guest Word. On how to teach writing

Graduates Hear Vonnegut On When It's Honorable To Be A 'Wise Guy'. A (real) Commencement Address

The Latest Word. On dictionaries.

Teaching The Unteachable

You can't teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do. Most bright people know that, but writers' conferences continue to multiply in the good old American summertime. Sixty-eight of them are listed in last April's issue of The Writer. Next year there will be more. They are harmless. They are shmoos.

I saw one horn five years ago--The Cape Cod Writers' conference in Craigville, Mass. It was more or less prayed into existence by three sweet preachers' wives. They were in middle life. They invited some Cape writers and English teachers to a meeting one winter night, and their spokeswoman said this: "We thought it would be nice if there were a writers' conference on Cape Cod next summer."

I remember another thing she said: "We thought established writers would probably enjoy helping beginners like us to break into the field."

And it came to pass. Isaac Asimov is the star this year. Stars of the past include Richard Kim and Jacques Barzun. Twenty-six students came the first year, forty-three the next, sixty-three the next, eighty-two the next, and nearly one hundred are expected this year-- in August. Most of the students are women. Several of them are preachers' wives in middle life.

So it goes.

I congratulated one of the founders recently, and she replied, "Well, it's been an awful lot of fun for all of us. Writers lead such lonely lives, you know, so they really enjoy getting together once a year to discuss matters of common interest."

That's the most delightful part of the game, of course: the pretense that everybody who comes to a writers' conference is a writer. Other forms of innocent summer recreation immediately suggest themselves: a doctors' conference, where everybody gets to pretend to be a doctor; a lawyer' conference, where everybody gets to pretend to be a lawyer; and so on--and maybe even a Kennedy conference, where everybody pretends to be somehow associated with the Kennedys.

"Who comes to writers' conferences?" you ask. A random sample of twenty students will contain six recent divorcees, three preachers' wives in middle life, five schoolteachers of no particular age or sex, two foxy grandmas, one sweet old widower with true tales to tell about railroading in Idaho, one real writer, one not merely angry but absolutely furious young man, and one physician with forty years' worth of privileged information that he wants to sell to the movies for a blue million.

"How much sex is there at writers' conferences?" you ask. The staff members, at any rate, don't come for sex. They hate conferences. They come for money. They are zombies. They want to collect their paychecks and go home. There are exceptions, who only prove the rule.

Honi soit qui mal y pense.

I saw another writers' conference born only this past June 18. I pick that date, since that was when the Student-Faculty Get-Acquainted Party was held. It was The West-Central Writers' Conference, sponsored by Western Illinois University, which is in Macomb, Ill. The party was held in the TraveLodge Motel in Macomb, in between the Coin-A-Wash and the A&W Rootbeer stand, because there was booze. There is a rule against booze on campus.

The founder and director wasn't a preacher's wife. He was a cigar-eating young English instructor named E. W. Johnson. In the conference brochure he claimed to have been a secondhand clothing salesman, a construction worker and a professional gambler. He is also a novelist and a writer of textbooks, and the only teacher at Western Illinois who has published a book. Johnson was sad at the party because he had sent out thousands of brochures and had advertised lavishly in Writer's Digest and Saturday Review and so on, and yet only 19 students had come. They were sitting around the room, rolling their eyes moonily, waiting for new friendships to begin.

"I can't understand it," he said above the Muzak and the sounds of drag races out on Route 136. "We have as good a staff as any conference in the country."

And the staff really was at least fair to middling. There was myself, described in the brochure as "the foremost black humorist in American fiction"; and there was Richard Yates, "perhaps the greatest living short story writer in America;" and there was John Clellon Holmes "the official biographer of the Beat Generation, who has recently completed a novel entitled ëPerfect Fools,' which is written from a ëwhite humor' point of view"; and there was Frederic Will, "one of the most versatile writers in America, having published extensively (eighteen books) in the fields of poetry, non-fiction and translation."

Johnson confessed that it had appeared for a while that only five students were coming, and he confessed too, that he had never been to a writers' conference before.

I asked him how he had come to found such a thing, and he said that he sure wasn't doing it for money. All he was getting as director was his regular instructor's pay. He honestly wanted to help writers.

The party died at midnight. Everybody had gone home by then except Johnson and a couple of staff members and a girl who had been recently divorced--from an Arab, she said. We were sitting around the swimming pool, breathing chlorine and carbon monoxide.

"You know why more people didn't come?" said the girl.

"Nope," said Jonson.

"Because Macomb, Illinois' sounds like such a hell-hole, and because "Western Illinois University' sounds like such a jerkwater school," she explained.

The Town isn't all that bad, I guess, and the University is handsome and booming. But there isn't any water there, and there aren't any mountains there, and there is no grand hotel. If you don't have water or mountains, and you want to fond a writer's conference, you had better have a grand hotel. Bloomington, Ind., is a hell-hole, God knows, but the Indiana University Writers' Conference takes place in the student union, which contains four restaurants, a pool hall, a barber shop, a bowling alley and a bookstore, and grown- ups can drink booze in their rooms.

I taught at Indiana's conference one summer. They're starring Jerome Weidman and Gerold Frank this year. The most touching thing that happened to me there was when Harry Mark Petrakis and I admitted to each other that we had never been published in The New Yorker, and probably never would be because we lacked that certain something. We thought it might be an ethnic thing, that they didn't like Greeks and Germans.

We have been brothers ever since.

We fours stars at Macomb had all taught at one time or another in the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. E. W. Johnson got his Master of Fine Arts degree there. I've quit after two years--not angrily, but feeling waterlogged. All the Workshop staffers were professional writers. Vance Bourjailly was the only one who ever got much writing done, probably because Iowa was his home. The rest of us were gypsies.

And one problem at Iowa, no problem at Macomb, was that the students were all very able writers. They were not committed to a silly week or two in the summertime. They were engaged in a two-year graduate program which was to end, ideally, with the completion of a novel of a short-story collection, or sometimes a play. They deserved help from their teachers, and there was time in which to give it to them.

"How did you help?" you ask.

Nothing is known about helping real writers to write better. I have discovered almost nothing about it during the past two years. I now make to my successor at Iowa a gift of the one rule that seemed to work for me: Leave real writers alone.

I haven't mentioned the poets in the Writers' Workshop because I don't know much about them. The poets talk all the time, like musicians, and this drives prose writers nuts. The poets are always between jobs, so to speak, and the prose writers are hung up on projects requiring months or years to complete.

The idea of a conference for prose writes is an absurdity. They don't confer, can't confer. It's all they can do to drag themselves past one another like great, wounded bears.

One thing I'm glad about: I got to see academic critics at Iowa. I had never seen academic critics before. They are felt to be tremendously creative people, and are paid like movie stars. I found that instructive.

When I saw my first academic critic, I said to a student, "Great God! Who was that?"

The student told me. Since I was so shaken, he asked me who I had thought the man was.

"The reincarnation of Beethoven," I said.

To return to the Macomb experiment one last time: I hope they get more people next year than came this year. If the conferences dies, it will be the first one that ever did. What they need to make things merrier is a sort of master of the revels, a graduate of some really great hotel school like Cornell University.

And they must stop telling staff members that they have to sign loyalty oaths or they won't get paid. Poor E. W. Johnson was humiliated when that happened in spite of all he tried to do to prevent it. A little touch like a loyalty oath can lead a visiting writer to suspect, rightly or wrongly, that his is employed by hicks.

Mr. Vonnegut is working on a new novel, "Slaughterhouse 5." A musical version of "Cat's Cradle," an earlier novel, will open on Broadway this year.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28/lifetimes/vonnegut-teaching.html

The Guest Word

A New Scheme for Real Writers

When I taught at Harvard a couple of years ago, many students were importuning the college to design what they had somehow agreed to call "a creative track" in the English department. This system of switches and semaphores was intended, as nearly as I could tell, to eliminate from the itineraries of talented persons all the whistle stops which were visited by the milk trains of scholarship. The Twentieth Century Limiteds on this new track would rocket nonstop to Chicago, which was variously a precocious novel or short story collection or play or scenario.

I am scarcely in a position to mock Harvard precocity, since I myself have sold the film rights to "Breakfast of Champions," a novel of mine, to a Harvard junior. He was a sophomore when he closed the deal, and not yet 21. Hi ho. Ron Kauffman is his name, sir.

So I mock not precocity but the dream of a creative track in an English department. It assumes that a college's best writers are of course in the English department. History, of course, tells us that they are at least as likely to be found among pre-med or pre-law students, or even in engineering or chemistry. My best writer at Harvard was a chemist. One of my best writers at City College, where I taught this past year, was an electrical engineer. One of my best writers at the University of Iowa, where I taught back in the sixties, was a lawyer. Another was a registered nurse.

So I recommend that English departments set up offices open from 10 to 5 on weekdays, say, where a student in any field whatsoever might bring works of imagination for criticism--and, maybe, in cases of astonishing excellence, for marketing advice. An English major, going about the nearly unrelated business of becoming a scholar of literature, would as appropriately visit such an office or not visit it as a person preparing to be a veterinarian.

No academic credit would be given for attempting to tell a story well, just as no credit is now given for eating or sleeping or puppy love.

Creative writing courses for credit might then be discontinued. Their teachers would be assigned to the hospitable offices I recommend. The teachers would then enter into genial tutorial relationships, lasting anywhere from minutes to years, with possibly gifted wanderers. Semesters would become as irrelevant as they really are. Grades would become as silly as football. No degrees or certificates or academic records of any sort would be kept, thus relieving English departments of the embarrassment of seeming to testify on paper that so-and-so is a creative writer.

So-and-so is very likely no such thing.

Teachers of creative writing would be in a position to be more fruitfully heartless than they are today. Under the present scheme, they are forced to promise what teachers of much less spooky subjects promise in the catalogues--to make almost anybody who cares to come to them more capable and wise. Most teachers of creative writing try to honor this impossible promise by welcoming everyone lovingly to the writing profession and by reserving especial praise for those few who have managed to write anything at all, even a letter home.

Under the new scheme, real writers from any part of the campus, or even articulate hoboes passing through town, could find lusty comradeship and worldly advice about writing for the asking. Professional writers who were down on their luck could still find easy employment as teachers while drying out. And they would be free to do what they are hampered from doing now, which is to tell people who can't write and who don't have anything much to write about anyway, most amiably:

"Sorry, friend. Goodbye."

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s latest book is a collection of essays, "Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons."

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28/lifetimes/vonnegut-scheme.html

A (Real) Commencement Address

The following remarks are from a speech at the Southampton College commencement last month by the writer Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who has a home on the East End.

"This speech conforms to the methods recommended by the United States Army Manual on how to teach. You tell people what you're going to tell them. Then you tell them, then you tell them what you told them.

Now we'll first discuss honorable behavior, especially in peacetime, and we'll then comment on the information revolution - the astonishing fact that human beings can actually know what they're talking about in case they want to try it. From there, I will go on to recommend to those graduating from colleges everywhere in the world this spring that their hero be Ignaz Semmelweis.

You may laugh at such a name for a hero, but you will become most respectful, I promise you, when I tell you how and why he died.

After I describe Ignaz Semmelweis a little, I will ask if he might not represent the next stage of human evolution. I will conclude that he had better be. If he doesn't represent what we're going to become next, then life is all over for us and for the cockroaches and the dandelions too.

I will give you a hint about him. He saved the lives of many women and children. If we continue on our present course there will be less and less of that going on. O.K.

Now we come to the main body of the speech, which is an amplification of the first part. See how memorable it all becomes. No wonder we have the greatest Army in the world. Honor. I have always wanted to be honorable. All of you want to be honorable too, I'm sure.

A lot of the talk about honor in the past has had to do with behavior on the battlefield. An honorable man holds his country's flag high even though he is as full of arrows as St. Sebastian. An honorable little drummer boy drums and drums and drums rat-a-tattat, rat-a-tat-tat till he has his little head blown off.

General Haig should really be here to talk about that sort of honor. I was only a corporal. Modern weapons, of course, have made that sort of honor even scarier than it used to be.

A person in control of missiles and nuclear warheads could behave so honorably as to get everybody killed. The whole planet could become like the head of the brave little drummer boy rolling off into a ditch somewhere.

So I will limit my discussion to honorable behavior in peacetime situations. In peacetime it is honorable to tell the truth to those who deserve to hear it.

You guarantee that you are telling the truth by saying I give my word of honor that such and such is true. I have never knowingly lied, having said first I give my word of honor. So I now give you my word of honor that it is a courageous and honorable and beautiful thing you have done to become college graduates.

I give you my word of honor that we love you and need you. We love you simply because you are of our species. You have been born. That is enough.

We need you because we hope to survive as a species, and you are in possession of or can get possession of solid information which, properly understood and put to use, can save us as a species.

I give you my word of honor as the adult version of ''cross my heart and hope to die.'' We are drawing ever closer to Ignaz Semmelweis, in case you're wondering what on earth happened to him. Just be patient. Most of you, if not all of you, feel inadequately educated. That is an ordinary feeling for a member of our species. One of the most brilliant human beings of all times, George Bernard Shaw, said on his 75th birthday or so that he knew enough at last to become a mediocre office boy. He died in 1950, by the way, when I was 28, about 10 years before most of you were born.

He would envy you now. He would envy your youth, surely. Perhaps you all know what he said about youth, that it was a shame to waste it on the young.

But he would be even greedier for the solid information which you have or can get about the nature of the universe, about time and space and matter; about your own bodies and brains. about the resources and vulnerabilities of our planet; about how all sorts of human beings actually talk and feel and live.

This is the information revolution I promised to tell you about. We have taken it very badly so far. Information seems to be getting in the way all the time. Human beings have had to guess about almost everything for the past million years or so. Our most enthralling and sometimes terrifying guesses are the leading characters in our history books. Should I name two of them? Aristotle and Hitler. One good guesser and one bad one.

If you haven't heard of them by now, this is a bust of a graduation. And the masses of humanity having no solid information have had little choice but to believe this guesser or that one. Russians who didn't think much of the guesses of Ivan the Terrible, for example, were likely to have their hats nailed to their heads.

Let us acknowledge, though, that persuasive guessers, even Ivan the Terrible, now a hero in the Soviet Union, have given us courage to endure extraordinary ordeals which we had no way of understanding. Crop failures, wars, plagues, eruptions of volcanoes, babies being born dead - they gave us the illusion that bad luck and good luck were understandable and could somehow be dealt with intelligently and effectively.

Without that illusion, we would all have surrendered long ago. The guessers, in fact, knew no more than the common people and sometimes less. The important thing was that somebody gave us the illusion that we're in control of our destinies.

Persuasive guessing has been at the core of leadership for so long for all of human experience so far that it is wholly unsurprising that most of the leaders of this planet, in spite of all the information that is suddenly ours, want the guessing to go on.

It is now their turn to guess and guess and be listened to. Some of the loudest, most proudly ignorant guessing in the world is going on in Washington today. Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by research and scholarship and investigative reporting.

They think that the whole country is sick of it, and they could be right. It isn't the gold standard that they want to put us back on; they want something even more basic than that. They want to put us back on the snake-oil standard again.

Loaded pistols are good for people unless they're in prisons or lunatic asylums. That's correct. Millions spent on public health are inflationary. That's correct. Billions spent on weapons will bring inflation down. That's correct. Dictatorships to the right are much closer to American ideals than dictatorships to the left. That's correct. The more hydrogen bomb warheads we have all set to go off at a moment's notice, the safer humanity is, the better the world our grandchildren will inherit. That's correct.

Industrial wastes and especially those which are radioactive hardly ever hurt anybody, so everybody should shut up about them. That's correct.

Industries should be allowed to do whatever they want to do. Bribe, wreck the environment just a little, fix prices, screw dumb customers, put a stop to competition and raid the Treasury in case they grow broke. That's correct. That's for enterprise. That's correct.

The poor have done something very wrong or they wouldn't be poor, so their children should pay the consequences. That's correct. The United States of America cannot be expected to look after its people. That's correct. The free market will do that. That's correct. The free market is an automatic system of justice. That's correct.

And if you actually remember one-tenth of what you've learned here, you will not be welcome in Washington, D.C. I know a couple of bright seventh graders who would not be welcomed in Washington, D.C. Do you remember those doctors a few months back who got together and announced that it was a simple, clear medical fact that we could not survive even a moderate attack by hydrogen bombs? They were not welcome in Washington, D.C.

Even if we fired the first salvo of hydrogen weapons and the enemy never fired back, the poisons released would probably kill the whole planet by and by.

What is the response in Washington? They guess otherwise. What good is an education? The boisterous guessers are still in charge - the haters of information. And the guessers are almost all highly educated people, think of that. They have had to throw away their education; even Harvard or Yale education.

If they didn't do that, there is no way their noninhibited guessing could go on and on and on. Please, don't you do that. And I give you something to cling to; for if you make use of the vast fund of knowledge now available to educated persons, you are going to be lonesome as hell. The guessers outnumber you and now I have to guess about 10 to 1.

The thing I give you to cling to is a poor thing, actually. Not much better than nothing, and maybe it's a little worse than nothing. I've already given it to you. It is the idea of a truly modern hero.It is the bare bones of the life of Ignaz Semmelweis. My hero is Ignaz Semmelweis. You may be wondering if I'm going to make you say that out loud again. No, I'm not, you've heard it for the last time.

He was born in Budapest in 1818. His life overlapped with that of my grandfather and with that of your great-grandfathers and it may seem a long time ago to you, but actually he lived only yesterday.

He became an obstetrician, which should make him modern hero enough. He devoted his life to the health of babies and mothers. We could use more heroes like that. There's damn little caring for mothers or babies or old people or anybody physically or economically weak these days as we become ever more industrialized and militarized with the guessers in charge.

I have said to you how new all this information is. It is so new that the idea that many diseases are caused by germs is only about l20 years old.

The house I own out here in Sagaponack is twice that old. I don't know how they lived long enough to finish it. I mean the germ theory is really recent. When my father was a little boy, Louis Pasteur was still alive and still plenty controversial. There were still plenty of high-powered guessers who were furious at people that would listen to him instead of to them. Yes, and Ignaz Semmelweis also believed that germs could cause diseases. He was horrified when he went to work for a maternity hospital in Vienna, Austria, to find out that one mother in 10 was dying of childbed fever there.

These were poor people - rich people still had their babies at home. Semmelweis observed hospital routines, and began to suspect that doctors were bringing the infection to the patients. He noticed that the doctors often went directly from dissecting corpses in the morgue to examining mothers in the maternity ward. He suggested as an experiment that the doctors wash their hands before touching the mothers.

What could be more insulting. How dare he make such a suggestion to his social superiors. He was a nobody, he realized. He was from out of town with no friends and protectors among the Austrian nobility. But all that dying went on and on and Semmelweis, having far less sense about how to get along with others in this world than you and I would have, kept on asking his colleagues to wash their hands.

They at last agreed to do this in a spirit of lampoonery, of satire, of scorn. How they must have lathered and lathered and scrubbed and scrubbed and cleaned under their fingernails. The dying stopped - imagine that! The dying stopped. He saved all those lives.

Subsequently, it might be said that he has saved millions of lives - including quite possibly yours and mine. What thanks did Semmelweis get from the leaders of his profession in Viennese society, guessers all? He was forced out of the hospital and out of Austria itself, whose people he had served so well. He finished his career in a provincial hospital in Hungary. There he gave up on humanity, which is us, and our knowledge, which is now yours, and on himself.

One day in the dissecting room, he took the blade of a scalpel with which he had been cutting up a corpse, and he stuck it on purpose into the palm of his hand. He died, as he knew he would, of blood poisoning soon afterward.

The guessers had had all the power. They had won again. Germs indeed. The guessers revealed something else about themselves too, which we should duly note today. They aren't really interested in saving lives. What matters to them is being listened to -as however ignorantly their guessing goes on and on and on. If there's anything they hate, it's a wise guy or a wise girl.

Be one anyway. Save our lives and your lives too. Be honorable. I thank you for your attention."

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28/lifetimes/vonnegut-commencement.html

The Latest Word

THE RANDOM HOUSE DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE The Unabridged Edition. Jess Stein, Editor in Chief; Laurence Urdang, Managing Editor. Illustrated.

I wonder now what Ernest Hemingway's dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that everybody can spell and truly understand. Mr. Hotchner, was it a frazzled wreck? My own is a tossed salad of instant coffee and tobacco crumbs and India paper, and anybody seeing it might fairly conclude that I ransack it hourly for a vocabulary like Arnold J. Toynbee's. The truth is that I have broken its spine looking up the difference between principle and principal, and how to spell cashmere. It is a dear leviathan left to me by my father, "Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language," based on the "International Dictionary" of 1890 and 1900. It doesn't have radar in it, or Wernher von Braun or sulfathiazole, but I know what they are. One time I actually took sulfathiazole.

And now I have this enormous and beautiful new bomb from Random House. I don't mean "bomb" in a pejorative sense, or in any dictionary sense, for that matter. I mean that the book is heavy and pregnant, and makes you think. One of the things it makes you think is that any gang of bright people with scads of money behind them can become appalling competitors in the American-unabridged-dictionary industry. They can make certain that they have all the words the other dictionaries have, then add words which have joined the language since the others were published, and then avoid mistakes that the others have caught particular hell for.

Random House has thrown in a color atlas of the world, as well, and concise dictionaries of French, Spanish, German and Italian. And would you look at the price? And, lawsy me, Christmas is coming.

When Mario Pei reviewed the savagely-bopped third revised edition of the "Merriam- Webster" for The Times in 1961, he complained of the "residual prudishness" which saw excluded certain four-letter words, "despite their copious appearance in numerous works of contemporary 'literature' as well as on restroom walls." Random House has satisfied this complaint somewhat. They haven't included enough of the words to allow a Pakistani to decode "Last Exit to Brooklyn," or "Ulysses," either--but they have made brave beginnings, dealing, wisely I think, with the alimentary canal. I found only one abrupt verb for sexually congressing a woman, and we surely have Edward Albee to thank for its currency, though he gets no credit for it. The verb is hump, as in "hump the hostess."

If my emphasis on dirty words so early in this review seems childish, I can only replay that I, as a child, would never have started going through unabridged dictionaries if I hadn't suspected that there were dirty words hidden in there, where only grownups were supposed to find them. I always ended the searches feeling hot and stuffy inside, and looking at the queer illustrations--at the trammel wheel, the arbalest, and the dugong.

Of course, one dictionary is as good as another to most people, who use them for spellers and bet-settlers and accessories to crossword puzzles and Scrabble games. But some people use them for more than that, or mean to. This was brought home to me only the other evening, whilst I was supping with the novelist and short-story writer, Richard Yates, and Prof. Robert Scholes, the famous praiser of John Barth's "Giles Goat-Boy." Yates asked Scholes, anxiously it seemed to me, which unabridged dictionary he should buy. He had just received a gorgeous grant for creative writing from the Federal Gumment, and the first thing he was going to buy was his entire language between hard covers. He was afraid that he might get a clunker--a word, by the way, not in this Random House job.

Scholes replied judiciously that Yates should get the second edition of the "Merriam- Webster," which was prescriptive rather than descriptive. Prescriptive, as nearly as I could tell, was like an honest cop, and descriptive was like a boozed-up war buddy from Mobile, Ala. Yates said he would get the tough one; but, my goodness, he doesn't need official instructions in English any more than he needs training wheels on his bicycle. As Scholes said later, Yates is the sort of man lexicographers read in order to discover what pretty new things the language is up to.

To find out in a rush whether a dictionary is prescriptive or descriptive, you look up ain't and like. I learned this trick of horseback logomachy from reviews of the "Merriam-Webster" third edition. And here is the rundown on ain't: the "Merriam-Webster" first edition says that it is colloquial or illiterate, the second says it is dialect or illiterate, and the third says that ain't is, "though disapproved by many and more common in less educated speech, used orally. . .by many cultivated speakers esp. in the phrase ain't I." I submit that this nation is so uniformly populated by parvenus with the heebie-jeebies that the phrase ain't I is heard about as frequently as the mating cry of the heath hen.

Random House says this about ain't: "Ain't is so traditionally and widely regarded as a nonstandard form that it should be shunned by all who prefer to avoid being considered illiterate. Ain't occurs occasionally in the informal speech of some educated users, especially in self-consciously [sic] or folksy or humorous contexts (Ain't it the truth! She ain't what she used to be!), but it is completely unacceptable in formal writing and speech. Although the expression ain't I is perhaps defensible--and it is considered more logical than aren't I? and more euphonious than amn't I?-- the well-advised person will avoid any use of ain't." How's that for advice to parvenus?

My mother isn't mentioned, but what she taught me to say in place of ain't I? or aren't I? or amn't I? was am I not? Speed isn't everything. So I lose a micro-second here and there. The main thing is to a graceful parvenu.

As for the use of like as though it were interchangeable with as: "M-W-1" says, "the use of like as a conjunction meaning as (as, Do like I do), though occasionally found in good writers, is a provincialism and contrary to good usage." "M-W-2" says that the same thing "is freely used only in illiterate speech and is now regarded as incorrect." "M-W-3" issues no warnings whatsoever, and flaunts models of current, O.K. usage from the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Independent, "wore his clothes like he was. . .afraid of getting dirt on them," and Art Linkletter, "impromptu programs where they ask questions much like I do on the air." "M-W-3," incidentally, came out during the dying days of the Eisenhower Administration, when simply everybody was talking like Art Linkletter.

Random House, in the catbird seat, since it gets to recite last, declares in 1966, "The use of like in place of as is universally condemned by teachers and editors, notwithstanding its wide currency, especially in advertising slogans. Do as I say, not as I do does not admit of like instead of as. In an occasional idiomatic phrase, it is somewhat less offensive when substituted for as if (He raced down the street like crazy), but this example is clearly colloquial and not likely to be found in any but the most informal written contexts." I find this excellent. It even tells who will hurt you if you make a mistake, and it withholds aid and comfort from those friends of cancer and money, those greedy enemies of the language who teach our children to say after school, "Winston tastes good like your cigarette should."

Random House is damned if it will set that slogan in type.

As you rumple through this new dictionary, looking for dirty words and schoolmarmisms tempered by worldliness, you will discover that biographies and major place names and even the names of famous works of art are integrated with the vocabulary: A Streetcar Named Desire, Ralph Ellison, Mona Lisa, Kiselevsk. I worry about the biographies and the works of art, since they seem a mixed bag, possibly locked for all eternity in a matrix of type. Norman Maileris there, for instance, but not William Styron or James Jones or Vance Bourjaily or Edward Lewis Wallant. And are we to be told throughout eternity this and no more about Alger Hiss: "born 1904, U.S. pubic official"? Any why is there no entry for Whittaker Chambers? And who promoted Peress?

It is the biographical inclusions and exclusions, in fact, which make this dictionary an ideal gift for the paranoiac on everybody's Christmas list. He will find dark entertainments without end between pages i and 2,059. Why are we informed about Joe Kennedy Sr., and Jack and Bobby, but not about Teddy or Jacqueline? What is somebody trying to tell us when T. S. Eliot is called a British poet and W. H. Auden is called an English poet? (Maybe the distinction aims at accounting for Auden's American citizenship.) And when Robert Welch Jr. is tagged as a "retired U.S. candy manufacturer," is this meant to make him look silly? And why is the memory of John Dillinger perpetuated, while of Adolf Eichmann there is neither gibber nor squeak?

Whoever decides to crash the unabridged dictionary game next--and it will probably be General Motors or Ford--they will winnow this work heartlessly for bloopers. There can't by many, since Random House has winnowed its noble predecessors. The big blooper, it seems to me, is not putting the biographies and works of art in an appendix, where they can be cheaply revised or junked or added to.

Have I made it clear that this book is a beauty? You can't beat the contents, and you can't beat the price. Somebody will beat both sooner or later, of course, because that is good old Free Enterprise, where the consumer benefits from battles between jolly green giants.

And, as I've said, one dictionary is as good as another for most people. Homo Americanus is going to go on speaking and writing the way he always has, no matter what dictionary he owns. Consider the citizen who was asked recently what he thought of President Johnson's use of the slang expression "cool it" in a major speech:

"It's fine with me," he replied. "Now's not the time for the President of the United States to worry about the King's English. After all, we're living in an informal age. Politicians don't go around in top hats any more. There's no reason why the English language shouldn't wear sports clothes, too. I don't say the President should speak like an illiterate. But 'cool it' is folksy, and the Chief Executive should be allowed to sound human. You can't be too corny for the American people--all the decent sentiments in life are corny. But linguistically speaking, Disraeli is dullsville."

These words, by the way, came from the larynx of Bennett Cerf, publisher of "The Random House Dictionary of the English Language." Moral: Everybody associated with a new dictionary ain't necessarily a new Samuel Johnson.

Mr. Vonnegut, a novelist, is currently teaching at the Writers Workshop, University of Iowa.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28/lifetimes/vonnegut-dictionary.html

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