Synonymous

Synonymous

suggestion

To the Editor:

James J. Kilpatrick makes sense on the whole with his essay, “Watch Those Out-Of-Town Words,” but not entirely. I take exception to his suggestion that a writer might better have substituted “bland” for “anodyne" in a New York Times article.

One of the definitions Webster’s gives for “anodyne" is “marked by an absence of power of stimulation” which seems to me to be a definition of a perfect word to use in the sentence on the recent productions of the West End theaters — that is, if the comments are just. After all, a prinicpal pui-pose of drama is stimulation, and in discussing it, “bland” isn’t an adequate substitute.

I say this because a function of writing is telling communication and since I know Mr. Kilpatrick is aware of that, I hope he will write an article — if he hasn’t already done so — on the importance of the mot juste — please, not too out-of-town a term?

I first ran across “anodyne” reading what I consider one of Emily Dickinson’s most affecting poems:

“The heaii asks pleasure first,

And then, excuse from pain;

And then, those little anodynes

That deaden suffering;

And then, to go to sleep;

And then, if it should be

The will of its Inquisitor,

The liberty to die.”

I don’t know what the anodynes were that a doctor prescribed in the 1850’s of Emily Dickinson. It ’would be interesting to learn: paregoric (camphorated tincute of opium flavored with aniseed and benzoic acid: soothing), laudanum (tincutre of opium — name given by Paracelsus to a costly panacae or elixor, later transferred to preparations containing opium), morphine (alkaloid