Postscript .

• •

By CYRIL RAY

IT'S ten years since 1 wrote my only articles for the Britannica Book of the Year, drily recording, for the exigu- ous Britannica fee, the events of 1952 in Moscow and' the Soviet Union—which were not, as I recall, of anything the eye-goggling importance of those of a it later, which included the death and burial Stalin.

ror some odd reason there hasn't been a ()Ii: of the Year article on Moscow since that 1954 reported that 'party dignitaries and ny commanders bore h] coffin to the huge Eck and red marble mausoleum,' and in the Yv volume on the events of 1961 (Britimnica ok of the Year, 1962; Encycloptedia Britan- !a Ltd., £5 5s.) such an interesting--one would ve said—and thought-provoking alteration in face of the city and its sightseeing attractions the removal of Stalin's remains had to be vered (briefly) in the more general article on USSR. Yet Berlin, London, Paris and New alc have articles of their own (recording,-for ample, that in October the Pavilion de Fiore s vacated by the French Ministry of Finance, J looking forward to a new baseball stadium Flushing Meadow), as have also San Marino, tar and the Comoro Archipelago. Not that 're is any reason to suspect political prejudice being responsible for the seven-year boycott Moscow, for many a truer-blue town gets the lie touch-me-not treatment: all roads may d to Rome, but not the columns of Britannica, it looks as though Tokyo will have to do )re than just be ;he biggest city in the world 'ore it gets any attention—it hasn't had any Mind you, it may be that I've misread the her complicated index and its various Pendages. For I could find no mention of the lik Ye of

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lea an 01c be Ye ra 4p Queen in the list of illustrations, whether .under `Queen' or 'Her Majesty' or 'Elizabeth II,' yet there she is, in no fewer than eleven .photo- graphs, at the consecration of Guildford Cathedral and in the Vatican, dining with the Shah and climbing on to an elephant, sitting in, the rain at Badminton and driving in the 'sun- shine at Ascot--ten more than either PrincesS Grace or !Mrs. Kennedy, Indeed, although the Eitcyclopadia Britannica is owned by an American company these days, the Book of the Year couldn't be more English : two pages, with illustrations, on cricket and . never a word, save for that passing reference to Flushing Meadow, about baseball. One is almost surprised that it is Major Gagarin, as the man of the year, that gets the full-page frontispiece, and not that living symbol of Britain 1961, Mr. Adam Faith (who gets more space, though, than Major Gagarin in the Biographies of the Year, more than the Archbishop of Canterbury and Mr. Conor Cruise O'Brien, and only a couple of lines fewer than Mr. Dean Rusk. The Archbishop of York gets more than his cousin of Canterbury, and I can only conclude that this is because it was York and not Canterbury who was co-starred with Mr. Faith on television: it's the people he knows, these days, that get a man ahead).

*

Who of us could tell, within a lustrum or so, the date on which a new word is coined? In the Book of the Year article on new words, John Albert Sheard, a lecturer in philology at King's College, London, makes 1961 the birth year of `traddict' for 'one addicted to traditional jazz,' and `chunner for Channel tunnel. Speaking for myself, I don't believe that `traddice is a word, and `chunner is one of those concoctions you find in a pop-paper headline but never on the lips of its readers (such words aren't always newly invented or artificially contrived. either: has anyone but a sub-editor ever called an in-