Devil's Dictionary Research Articles

Rethinking multilingual experience through a Systems Framework of Bilingualism

AbstractIn “The Devil's Dictionary”, Bierce (1911) defined language as “The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure.” This satirical definition reflects a core truth – humans communicate using language to accomplish social goals. In this Keynote, we urge cognitive scientists and neuroscientists to more fully embrace sociolinguistic and sociocultural experiences as part of their theoretical and empirical purview. To this end, we review theoretical antecedents of such approaches, and offer a new framework – theSystems Framework of Bilingualism– that we hope will be useful in this regard. We conclude with new questions to nudge our discipline towards a more nuanced, inclusive, and socially-informed scientific understanding of multilingual experience. We hope to engage a wide array of researchers united under the broad umbrella of multilingualism (e.g., researchers in neurocognition, sociolinguistics, and applied scientists).

IDD of World War III SB and Inhuman Devil's Dictionary and Legislation of Salvation

IDD of World War III SB and Inhuman Devil's Dictionary and Legislation of Salvation

Polish Translations of The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce

The "dictionary" is a vague concept—borderline cases include (but are not limited to) literary and journalistic works which use lexicographic structure to convey various types of content. Among such works, The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce is a well-known example. This article is concerned with its major Polish translations and focuses on three questions: how the translators coped with Bierce's text, occasionally difficult to render in a foreign language; what they were guided by in choosing entries for translation; and finally, what might have induced them to take an interest in Bierce's dictionary. An attempt will also be made to position The Devil's Dictionary within the field of lexicography with special attention paid to atypical or less typical dictionaries.

On Reverence and its Discontents

On Reverence and its Discontents Thomas White And we are here as on a darkling plain…swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight…where ignorant armies clash by night. Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach Reverence: the spiritual attitude of a man to a god and a dog to a man. Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary …somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun…what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming In our fractured age, concerns over sectarian strife and the discords of globalization have made Matthew Arnold's complaint our complaint and Ambrose Bierce's scathing dismissal of religious reverence compelling. Meanwhile, it seems that some, having lapsed into complete despair, await their own version of Yeats’ strange creature to emerge from the wasteland of their choice to signal the advent of End Times. The crowding‐in of global strife and sorrow via our daily news feeds sorely tests the average person's hope that there is any precious light worthy of reverence not extinguished by our global “darkling plain.” Once again the world is too much with us. Considering the questions “What is Reverence?” and “What ought we to revere?” means moving away from spiritual despair, but also forward from a reputed transcendence that despite Christian protestations to the contrary still seem remote from our quotidian affairs. However, a secularist understanding of reverence as servile submission to a tyrannical transcendence, which destroys personal autonomy, is not a correct understanding of genuine reverence. A sense of something “more than human” that checks the human‐all‐too‐human's impulse toward inhumanity is needed to protect, and pay homage to, the higher ideals, including compassion, that protect humanity. Reverence is necessary to elicit the best from humans, as well as to shield against the worse (yet if reverence can be a virtue it can also be, as we shall see, a vice). An enlightened reverence means negotiating the fine line between human limitations and the blandishments of the putative Transcendent, while keeping a healthy awareness of the difference. Ignoring this, getting too confident about one's “special relationship” with the gods, is, as in the case of Agamemnon, the “sure sign,” Classicist Paul Woodruff tells us, “of irreverence.” W.B. Yeats’ poem The Second Coming certainly foretold of an irreverent world—both indifferent and intense—where the reverential sensibility had become so corrupted that it could only pay homage to false, if not savage, gods: the menacing beast‐human that slouches toward Bethlehem heralds the impossibility of revering anything edifying. It is a symbol of the deformed reverence that, as this essay will argue, resonates in our contemporary world. When a 24/7 media‐drenched world diverts attention from real, fundamental alternatives worthy of reverence—or when the genuine reverential sensibility itself dies—there are only degrees of cynicism and world‐weariness: The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. “Best” and “worse” are ironical here because between these two choices there are no real differences, only shades of disenchantment But does a fresh look at reverence and its discontents mean dusting off the old saints and gods/God of lore and genuflecting before them/It anew? Summoning up the old catechisms? Renovating bare‐ruined choirs? If we cannot return to—and revere—the Divinities of yesteryear are we left with nothing more than a lonely, disenchanted universe? Therein hangs the tale, and the challenge to this essay. Reverence, secularism, and cynicism Ambrose Bierce, like all cynics, saw only the lowest common denominator. Corrupted forms of ideas, actions, beliefs, etc., become “all there is.” There is a definite strain of this in the so‐called New Atheism. Philosophy scholar Charles Kitcher, himself a strong defender of secular humanism, observes that these “Darwinian atheists” downplay the more affirmative aspects of religion preferring to emphasize its historical dark side: Darwinian atheists exult in the ferocity of religious wars, the willingness to torture in the name of the deity (or deities), the intolerant persecution of forms of...

Definition

Definition Tim Cassedy (bio) As an enslaved teenager in Baltimore in the 1830s, Frederick Douglass kept hearing about something called "abolition"—a word whose meaning he did not know. "If a slave killed his master, set fire to a barn, or did anything very wrong in the mind of a slaveholder," he observed, "it was spoken of as the fruit of abolition. Hearing the word in this connection very often, I set about learning what it meant." He looked up abolition in a dictionary and found the definition: abolition. n.s.: The act of abolishing.1 Though technically unimpeachable, this definition was not helpful to Douglass. "Here I was perplexed," he noted drily some decades later, for "it left me in ignorance at the very point where I most wanted information—and that was, as to the thing to be abolished." When he eventually did learn the meaning of abolition, it was not from a definition but from context: he read a newspaper article advocating the "abolition of slavery" and realized that this was the "abolition" in question. Thus, Douglass pointedly observed, the newspaper "gave me the incendiary information denied me by the dictionary."2 Douglass was evidently familiar with the norm that if you don't know what a word means, you should look up its definition in a dictionary. This is far from the only imaginable strategy for learning the meanings of words, and as Douglass's experience illustrates, it's not always an effective one. Douglass doesn't specify how he learned to expect a dictionary to disclose the meaning of an unfamiliar word—but I acquired the same expectation, and I know where I learned it: it was taught to me in grade school, implicitly as well as overtly, and at least once in song. "Oh, the dic-dic-dictionary / is very necessary," trilled an old LP that played repeatedly in a classroom of my early childhood: Imaginary or contrary, any old word you've seen,estuary, dromedary: find out what they mean.3 [End Page 345] The lyrics make a dictionary out as a kind of key that can unlock hidden realms of knowledge. "Look inside if you've a mind / to learn the answers first," the song continues, rising to the preposterous conclusion that "it's the perfect book, you'll find, / to quench your mental thirst."4 Although I doubt very much that a dictionary has ever been the perfect book to quench any child's mental thirst, it is true that there are circumstances under which a choice definition can help you understand something you didn't understand before. But the lexicographical promise to help you understand coexists awkwardly with the overwhelming tendency of dictionary definitions to be at least as obscure as the words they ostensibly illuminate. Douglass was not the first to discover this irony. Already by the 1780s, Samuel Johnson's definition of the word network was proverbial for its un-helpfulness: "Any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections."5 The rhetoric of definitions is distinctive and peculiar, often involving the words "that which …," "one who …," "the quality or state of …," "belonging to or resembling …," and especially "of or pertaining to. …" Etymologically speaking, a definition is not an opening of meaning but a closing-off: a bounding, a hemming-in, a delimiting, a conferring of the "finitude" at the word's center. Ambrose Bierce would parody the self-obfuscating tendency of dictionary definitions in thirty years' worth of newspaper columns that he later compiled into The Devil's Dictionary (1911): eat, v. i. To perform successively (and successfully) the functions of mastication, humectation, and deglutition.6 Unlike a gloss, which is tasked with getting you close enough to a word's meaning that you can understand it, a definition is tasked with circumscribing that meaning and showing where it begins and ends, like a fence or hedgerow. The worth of doing this is not obvious unless you have been educated to value it—for example, via a recorded voice insisting in chorus after chorus that "the dic-dic-dictionary / is very necessary." When the psychologist A. R. Luria wanted Soviet peasants...

The Puritan culture of America's military: U.S. Army war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan

Contents: Preface An excerpt from The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Introduction 'A prayer against our enemies' An overview of American military justice Excerpts from The Swedish Articles of War Puritan military justice Excerpts from one letter and two speeches Puritanism and responsibility Two stories of hunting witches Puritanism and revenge An excerpt on military superstitions of World War II Puritanism and superstition An excerpt from Sam Vaknin's Malignant Self-Love Puritanism and narcissism A definition from The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce Conclusion and discussion References Index.

The devil's dictionary of business strategy, volume II

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to humorously define various common business and strategy terms to amuse and illuminate.Design/methodology/approachThe paper takes the form of a lexicon.FindingsMan's search for meaning can end up with one's nose in a dictionary. Again.Research limitations/implicationsNo research, hence no research limitations. No implications beyond any humour that might be found within.Practical implicationsPractical implications have been brought as close as possible to absolute zero. Purely humorous.Social implications“Hey, this one is kind of funny. But I really don't get this one”.Originality/valueThe paper is a diversion.

The devil's dictionary of business strategy

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to humorously define various common business and strategy terms to amuse and illuminate.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is a lexicon.FindingsThe paper finds that man's search for meaning can end up with one's nose in a dictionary.Originality/valueThe paper is a diversion.

Up the Down Pay Scale: Teachers vs. Football Coaches

Up the Down Pay Scale: Teachers <i>vs.</i> Football Coaches

Review: The Devil's Food Dictionary: A Pioneering Culinary Reference Work Consisting Entirely of Lies, by Barry Foy and John Boesche

Review: <i>The Devil's Food Dictionary: A Pioneering Culinary Reference Work Consisting Entirely of Lies</i>, by Barry Foy and John Boesche

Dracula and duty

Reading Bram Stoker's Dracula is a bit like watching a perverse puppet show – perverse not because the performance happens to include explicit sadomasochistic acts (whose perversity, in any case, i...

The Bridge That Choked a Watercourse or Repetitive Dictionary Disorder

DICTIONARY, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. The present dictionary, however, is one of the most useful works that its author, Dr John Satan, has ever produced. It is designed to be a compendium of everything that is known up to date of its completion, and will drive a screw, repair a red wagon or apply for a divorce. It is a good substitute for measels [sic], and will make rats come out of their holes to die. It is a dead shot for worms, and children cry for it. Ambrose Bierce The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary (2005: Athens (Ga.), University of Georgia Press) eds. David E. Schultz & S.T. Joshi. Mr Robinson owns a property on the banks of the river Torridge at Taddiport (orig. Toad-gate) in North Devon. His land,...

A new decade, a new editor

A new decade, a new editor

The Devil's Dictionary

The Devil's Dictionary

And Quiet Flows the Vodka, or When Pushkin Comes to Shove: The Curmudgeon's Guide to Russian Literature and Culture, with The Devil's Dictionary of Received Ideas: Alphabetical Reflections on the Loathsomeness of Russia, American Academia and Humanity in General by Alicia Chudo Andrew Sobesednikov (review)

740 SEER, 79, 4, 200I the Belgrade Film Academy (p. I8o). Once one such inconsistency has been discovered, the reader begins to wonder which others might have slipped through unnoticed, and this undermines the book as a whole. Nonetheless, TheBFI Companion toEastern European andRussianCinema is a worthwhile book to own and should certainlybe held in any librarydealing with Russian and East European culture, as well as in film studies libraries.It is an unenviable task to compile such a volume and the editors are to be thanked, despite the few oversightsI have unkindlyhighlighted. London MILENA MICHALSKI Chudo, Alicia. And QuietFlowstheVodka, or WhenPushkinComes to Shove.The Curmudgeon's Guide toRussian Literature andCulture, withTheDevil'sDictionary ofReceived Ideas.Alphabetical Reflections ontheLoathsomeness ofRussia, American Academiaand Humanityin General.Edited by Andrew Sobesednikov. Northwestern University Press,Evanston, IL, 2000. Viii + 249 PP. Illustrations .Appendices. $14.95: ?I 2.95. HUMOUR is, of course,knownforitsindividualappeal orlackof it. Fewreaders of this eclectic compendium, however, will fail to be amused, at least, from time to time by the cornucopia of reflections, commentaries, pictures and poems offeredfrom what for this reviewerwas a very unexpected source. On the other hand perhaps only such an impressivescholaras Gary Saul Morson could allow himselfnot one pseudonym, but two. The first part of the book comprises a chronological review of Russian literature in thirteen chapters. An obvious comparison is Io66 andAll That, but Chudo/Morson has a very distinctive manner. From 'Beginnings: The PrimarySchoolChronicle and Prince Vladimir' to 'Notes on the Twentieth Century' via,to take a few examples, 'The Hilarious Sermon', 'Gogol, with His Story "Kleptonasia"', 'Dostoevsky'sUnfinished Novel, Torture (from the Notebooks to TheIdiot): With Commentary', and 'Scene from Chekhov'sPlay 7The Dodo'.Amongst the items from the twentieth century may be mentioned the first,on 'the age of pseudonyms', which begins thus:'The early twentieth centuryis sometimesknown as the age of meaningfulpseudonyms, a tradition initiated by Maxim Gorky (Bitter).Imitators included the writers Irritated, Annoyed, Pissed-of, Angry, Outraged, Grumpy,Dopey and Sneezy. It was at thisperiod that the Russiansdiscoveredsex, and severalwriterschose a nomde pube. The name Friedrich Semenov, for instance, expressed its author's ambition to "mix Nietzsche with semen"' (p. IO3).The section on Bakhtin and the three new storiesby Daniil Kharms are requiredreadingfor acolytes. The book is adorned with illustrationsbased on 'Malevich's'black and white oblong shapes;among themaretwoof thewhite ones, describedasillustrations to DeadSoulsand Tolstoi's SnowStorm; a black one is labelled 'Stalin Prize winner, 1937, Striveforthe BrightFuture!'. 'Appendicitis'comprises 'The Awful Russian Language', 'Key Dates in Russian History', 'ClassifiedReclassified:Advertising Russian History', and 'Chudo's FamiliarQuotations from Russian Culture'. It was Bernard Shaw who said that the truthwas the funniestjoke in the world, and Chudo seems REVIEWS 74I to agree: in the second and the fourth of these appendices, all but one of the dates and quotations are genuine. The other two have no such credentials:a sample of the first appendix is: 'Twelve adjectives were sentenced to labor camps,andtwopreviouslycommon particlesbecame unpropositions'(p. I39). The spoof classified ads, arranged by years, particularly appealed to this reviewer:example, 'I740. If you my husband have seen, please to contact me in Frankfurt.Missing since 1726' (P.I47), or 'I864. Spiteful old lady, life worth less than a cockroach, needed for social science researchproject.If you know one, contact RR' (p. I49). The conclusion to this section is entitled 'Two Dialogues of the Dead on EssentialRussianness'(p. 157). 'The Devil's Dictionary of Received Ideas'goes beyond Russiato American (and, doubtlessother)academia:for instance, 'academicjournals. A place for blind reviewing of dumb writing. "This article's a pile of rubbish." "It footnotes you three times, John." "Publish."' (p. I7I). Another example could be 'Comintern. Soviet physician. The public healthjust took a turn / For ill. Send for the Comintern' (p. I83). Finally, 'pseudonymous.Authored byBakhtin' (p. 2I9). This is a curate'segg, but curatesand eggs (leaving Russianpuns aside)are also far from standard. The present reviewer, whilst considering the verses much of a muchness, has attempted to choose a selection of good ratherthan weak examples. The quotations, genuine and spoof alike, may appeal to literature and history teachers setting exams, and to students seeking points for their essays.Literaryscholars,in...

Russia and Soul: An Exploration by Dale s&gt; Pesmen (review)

REVIEWS 74I to agree: in the second and the fourth of these appendices, all but one of the dates and quotations are genuine. The other two have no such credentials:a sample of the first appendix is: 'Twelve adjectives were sentenced to labor camps,andtwopreviouslycommon particlesbecame unpropositions'(p. I39). The spoof classified ads, arranged by years, particularly appealed to this reviewer:example, 'I740. If you my husband have seen, please to contact me in Frankfurt.Missing since 1726' (P.I47), or 'I864. Spiteful old lady, life worth less than a cockroach, needed for social science researchproject.If you know one, contact RR' (p. I49). The conclusion to this section is entitled 'Two Dialogues of the Dead on EssentialRussianness'(p. 157). 'The Devil's Dictionary of Received Ideas'goes beyond Russiato American (and, doubtlessother)academia:for instance, 'academicjournals. A place for blind reviewing of dumb writing. "This article's a pile of rubbish." "It footnotes you three times, John." "Publish."' (p. I7I). Another example could be 'Comintern. Soviet physician. The public healthjust took a turn / For ill. Send for the Comintern' (p. I83). Finally, 'pseudonymous.Authored byBakhtin' (p. 2I9). This is a curate'segg, but curatesand eggs (leaving Russianpuns aside)are also far from standard. The present reviewer, whilst considering the verses much of a muchness, has attempted to choose a selection of good ratherthan weak examples. The quotations, genuine and spoof alike, may appeal to literature and history teachers setting exams, and to students seeking points for their essays.Literaryscholars,in particular,should look up theirfavourite authors the three Kharms stories, for instance, fit seamlessly into his canon -and there is much wit and imagination to enjoy in small doses. This is definitelya book for dipping into, and it deservesa place in all but the most po-faced libraries. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies ARNOLD MCMILLIN University College London Pesmen, Dale. RussiaandSoul.AnExploration. Cornell University Press,Ithaca, NY, and London, 2000. xii + 364pp. Bibliography. Index. /29.50; /Ji2.95. SOMEreaders of this periodical probably reached for the nearest revolver as soon as they saw the title of the monograph that is here under review. Before firinginto the air in order to otvesti dushu ('let off steam', as in a bania),sceptics should at least read the book's epilogue ('Non-Russian Souls', pp. 324-38), 'Two Stories' (pp. II 7-25) and, especially if they are philologists, chapter nine (pp. I89-207) on krutoi and krutit'sia. In otherwords, this is a book which busy people may not want to read from cover to cover but which is certainly worth dipping into from time to time, especiallyif one is becoming ratherless embarrassedwhen talkingin public about one's own and other people's souls (even Stalin did it, not least when referringto writersas engineers). Dale Pesmen is a brave American woman who not only dared to publish a book with such a provocative and nauseating (tosome) title but also voluntarily experienced several years of Soviet and post-Soviet bytin and around the 742 SEER, 79, 4, 200I unprepossessing Siberian city of Omsk (sometimes jokingly deciphered as Otdalennoe mestossyl'nykh i katorzhnykh, p. 20). Kicking off from Anna Wierzbicka 's statement that 'Soulcan always be translated into Russian as dusha, while the reverseis not true' (p. ix), Pesmen uses her trainingin anthropology and ethnography as well as her good (if not perfect) command of Russian to investigate some of the superficialand some of the deep manifestationsof the souls of people in the RSFSR/RF in the I990s. This naturally requires an examination of the importance of the bania,blat,sitting together at table, drinking,exploiting loopholes in the Soviet 'system'(and post-Soviet bardak); singing, inter-strata relationships and, especially, byt.These analyses could have been edited into clearer English, but even where the meaning is somewhat opaque the general drift is always clarified by the numerous quotations from the cross-section of the Siberian population with whom Pesmen has chosen to spend a good deal of her life. During the last eighteen months your reviewer has himself done time in three areas of provincial Russia several hundred miles to the east, south and north of Moscow, and would liketo confirmthat most of...

The Cultural Arms of the Corporate Establishment: Reflections on the Work of Herb Schiller

If New York glitters like gold and has buildings with 500 bars, let me leave it written that they were built from the sweat of the canefields: the banana plantation is a green inferno so that in New York they may drink and dance (Neruda, 1974). Herbert Schiller, who died on January 29, 2000 at the age of 80, was one of the most widely recognized and influential political economists of communication. For four decades he represented the center of gravity in the global debates on cultural imperialism, the power of the media, and many persistent and pervasive themes in international communication. As a leader, scholar, and teacher he strived for a just and fair society and a passionate belief in social justice and social accountability ran through all his writings. Schiller was one of the first analysts to realize that in the late 20th century the Marxist formula for capitalist rule had changed to something at once more pervasive and less visible. The classic Marxist formulation referred to ownership of the means of production. It evolved toward monopoly or conglomerate ownership and eventually to what Bertram Gross described as friendly fascism. Gross (1980) maintained that the governing mechanisms in America were obscured by facades behind which the decisions were made by intricate networks of business cartels working closely with military officers and their own people in civilian government (p. 31). According to Schiller, the new driving force, vanguard of the old, is less visible precisely because it is more pervasive. Does the fish in the ocean know that it is swimming in salt water? Today children are born into a commercial media (mostly television) environment that defines their world and their role in it. Lacking alternative for comparison and judgment, the media-dominated cultural environment seems natural, inevitable, and unalterable. That condition is the prime requirement for ideological control at home and imperial policy abroad. Corporate rule becomes identified with democracy. The citizen is given no alternative vision of the good society. Wealth is extol led, the gap between the rich and the poor widens, and poverty increases unreported and unobserved. At the dawn of the 20th century, Ambrose Bierce (1946) in The Devil's Dictionary defined the corporation as an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility (p. 216). The definition still holds. But near the end of this century, the profits--and grim consequences--of this ingenious device went beyond anything the Bierce could have imagined. A recent study (Hoynes, 1999) of news and public affairs programming by the media watchdog-group FAIR found that the voice of business on television was much louder than all others even on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). More than one-third of all on-camera sources were representatives of corporate America or Wall Street. The 1999 study also indicated that the recent findings almost doubled the percentage found in a similar 1992 study. Schiller (2000, p. 101) observed that corporate influence pervades nearly every aspect of society. From simple things, like our daily diet and the clothes we wear, to matters of larger scale, like the way we communicate with each other. Schiller had foreseen and critiqued all that. He had concluded that the two party system and control of information were inherent in and necessary for the perpetuation of the corporate order. He had lived through the brutality of the Great Depression. In 1929 his father lost his job as a jeweler and was unemployed until 1940, when war production created new jobs. In Living in the Number One Country: Reflections from a Critic of American Empire Schiller (2000) recalled the sense of the period: There was always the money worry ... There were frequent quarrels, most of which had economic origin.... This atmosphere penetrated my being with sadness and resentment. …

And Quiet Flows the Vodka, or When Pushkin Comes to Shove: The Curmudgeon's Guide to Russian Literature and Culture, with the Devil's Dictionary of Received Ideas

And Quiet Flows the Vodka, or When Pushkin Comes to Shove: The Curmudgeon's Guide to Russian Literature and Culture, with the Devil's Dictionary of Received Ideas

Academic keywords: a devil's dictionary for higher education

Academic keywords: a devil's dictionary for higher education

Weighty Matter: the second edition of the International Encyclopedia of Education

What should an encyclopedia do to justify its name? The word encyclopedia seems to be something of a mistake, 'an erroneous form' resulting from a misreading of the Greek, according to the Oxford English Dictionary and confirmed in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which not surprisingly devotes some thirteen pages to its entry on the term, much of which is concerned with its linguistic derivation. Originally used to describe 'the circle of learning; a general course of instruction' (doctrinarum omnium disciplina), it came later to depict 'a literary work containing extensive information on all branches of knowledge'. The OED's third entry for the word-'an elaborate and extensive repertory of information on all the branches of some particular art or department of knowledge'-provides a useful working definition for a specialist encyclopedia like that with which this article is principally concerned, the second edition of the International Encyclopedia of Education (henceforth IEE; editors-inchief Torsten Husen & T. Neville Postlethwaite, Pergamon, 1994). In their preface to the first edition (1985; reviewed in the Oxford Review of Education, Vol. 12, No. 1, of 1986) Husen and Postlethwaite summarised their aims in a way consonant with this definition: 'The Encyclopedia is an attempt to present a well-documented, international overview of the major aspects of the education enterprise by taking into account the various practices and research paradigms in different socioeconomic, cultural, and political contexts'. In this they clearly succeeded, and IEE has since secured a place as a major work of reference. The appearance of a second edition within ten years of the publication of the first will be welcomed by those scholars of education who have come to rely on the Encyclopedia as an accessible first point of reference in their day-to-day work. Editors of encyclopedias, like compilers of dictionaries, face the unenviable task of aiming at the comprehensive coverage implied by 'an elaborate and extensive repertory' while at the same time-by virtue of the impossibility of achieving such coverage-having to leave out much material that arguably they might include. Comprehensive and up-to-date coverage remains, however, the claim most such editors and compilers would wish to make for their work. Ambrose Bierce, in his delightful Devil's Dictionary, makes a personal claim which lampoons the position of so many editors: