To the editors:
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Midway through his unintentionally hilarious defense of disco in your September 13 issue, Bill Wyman chides 70s rock-and-roll songwriters for their pretentious lyrics. However, his next few paragraphs contain four words (“logorrheic,” “lumpen,” “unparsable,” and “tautological”) that had me, an English teacher with 15 years experience on both the high school and college levels, running to a dictionary for definitions. My resource of choice, Webster’s New World Dictionary, included only the definition of tautological (a synonym of which–redundant–seems quite serviceable). Granted, the NWD is abridged, but, hey, this is rock and roll we’re talking about here. One shouldn’t have to consult a dictionary the size of the Sears Tower to understand words used to describe K.C. and the Sunshine Band! In addition, the spell-checker on the word processor I am using to write this letter recognizes only tautological as well.
Evanston
