Eugene Ehrlich, 85, Exotic Word Aggregator
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 crème de la crème 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.
