Eugene Ehrlich, 85, Exotic Word Aggregator
Hyfler/Rosner
By STEPHEN MILLER, STAFF REPORTER OF THE SUN | April 8, 2008
Eugene Ehrlich, who died Saturday at 85, was a Columbia
University English professor and author of a score of
reference books on words and usage.
As an editor of the Oxford American Dictionary, which first
appeared in 1980, he took credit for the inclusion of
"humongous," among other regional slang. He also wrote books
about how and when to use Latin phrases while avoiding
appearing a pedant.
Raised in the shadow of his parents' Third Avenue Stationery
store in Murray Hill, Ehrlich grew up with two of the
original Dead End Kids, and later recalled he had "a
terrible accent." He attended Townsend Harris High School
and then City College, where a linguistics professor
convinced him to change the way he spoke.
During World War II, Ehrlich took a crash course in Japanese
and became an Army interrogator.
He did graduate work in English at Columbia's Teachers
College after the war and worked as an instructor at
Fairleigh Dickinson University. He also taught writing
skills to engineers at Bell Laboratories and Sikorsky
Aircraft. He later returned to Columbia and became head of
its reading improvement program.
He was often quoted as a skeptic of speed-reading courses
like Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics that promised speeds of up
to 30,000 words a minute - fast enough to polish of "Gone
With the Wind" in under half an hour. Ehrlich maintained
that only the creme de la creme could read even 800 words a
minute. He told the Wall Street Journal in 1967 that he
offered to pay $100 to anyone demonstrating an effective
reading speed of 2,000 words a minute. He added, "No one has
ever shown up."
After helping edit the Oxford American Dictionary, he
produced "The Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to the
United States" (1982) a sumptuously illustrated volume that,
at 4 pounds, might be a challenge to heft on tour. His first
book on Latin vocabulary, "Amo, Amas, Amat and More" (1985)
was originally meant to be titled "All the Latin You Need to
Know to Understand William F. Buckley and Others of That
Ilk" -but then Buckley agreed to write the introduction.
Ehrlich also wrote a guide to words from the Bible and also
from various foreign languages, including "You've Got
Ketchup on Your Muumuu: An A to Z guide to English Words
From Around the World" (2000). Word maven William Safire
admired the inclusion of Pickelhaube, "a German army spoked
helmet of a type worn before and during World War I."
Another example of Ehrlich's literary detection: The guppy
was named for R.J.L. Guppy, a Trinidadian clergyman who sent
the first recorded specimen to the British Museum in 1866.
He left unfinished a manuscript on the Yiddish he heard
growing up in New York.
Eugene Ehrlich
Born May 21, 1922, in Brooklyn; died April 5 at his home in
Mamaroneck after suffering from dementia; survived by his
wife, Norma Solway, his children, Anne, Henry, Richard, and
Jonathan, and 10 grandchildren.