National Affairs: Opprobriousness Deleted

The only reference to Jews which will appear in Thomas Y. Crowell Co.’s* new edition of Roget’s International Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases† when it appears next month will be: “Jew. In the original edition Roget included the word Jew in several groups of synonyms. In this printing all uncomplimentary racial allusions have been omitted.”

Last week the American Hebrew received many a Jew’s congratulations for accomplishing this deletion. Its Associate Editor Walter Hart Blumenthal last February flayed the Crowell company for perpetrating Roget’s opprobrious connotations of the word Jew: cunning, usurer, rich, extortioner, heretic, deceiver, impostor, harpy, schemer, lickpenny, pinchfist, Shylock, chicanery, duplicity, crafty.* Mr. Blumenthal, 47, sent his article to Thomas Irving Crowell, 65, Protestant. The ‘B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League prosecuted a flank attack on Mr. Crowell. He promised to purge Roget’s in his new edition. As surety the other day he sent Mr. Blumenthal proofs of now inoffensive pages. Therefore last week Jews lifted Crowell’s Roget’s “from their index expurgatorius.”

Webster’s New International Dictionary defines jew: “… To overreach by sharp practice, cheating or trickery; to practice imposition or extortion upon;— used opprobriously in allusion to practices imputed to the Jews by those who dislike them, or now sometimes colloquially without conscious reference to the Jews.”

Funk & Wagnall’s Standard Dictionary meanings: “. . . (Slang.) A close or hard bargainer; a moneylender or usurer; an opprobrious use.”

*Not to be confused with Crowell Publishing Co. (American Magazine, Collier’s, Woman’s Home Companion’).

†Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869), French-descended English physiologist and physician, onetime secretary of the Royal Society, after 50 years compilation published his famed and useful Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases in 1852, “so as to facilitate the expression of ideas and assist in literary composition.” His son John Lewis Roget enlarged and improved the Thesaurus in new editions until his death in 1908. John Lewis’ son, Samuel Romilly Roget, physicist who did important work on the “aging”‘ and electro magnetic qualities of iron, continued the family revisions until 1911. Since then this reference book has been any one’s to republish. U. S. publishers are Thomas Y Crowell Co., Theo. E. Schulte, E. P. Dutton & Co., Longmans, Green & Co. The 14th (new) edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica mentions no Rogets, the 11th edition only Samuel Romilly as a physicist.

*Two currently common, uncomplimentary terms for Jew, apparently too modern for Roget’s are: hebe (collegiate and journalese), kike (general). Cleveland Jews call Cleveland Heights, where many co-religionists reside, “Kike’s Peak.”