By Robert Oliphant

If he were alive today, Dr. Samuel Johnson would probably hand out an alpha plus to the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. As a lexicographer he was the first to attack the multiple-meaning problem posed by Humpty Dumpty's insistence that glory can mean "knock down argument," just as the imperative Share! can for many small children mean " Gimme !" And the FCAT has in effect recently translated Johnson's use of illustrative quotations into test questions designed to measure how well high school students can recognize which meaning of a word best fits its use in a specific sentence.

An FCAT Johnsonian question (single quotation plus multiple-meaning possibilities) . . . . Here by way of illustration is Question 54 from a recent FCAT Released Test Booklet. . . .   " In his response to Abigail Adams' letter [it precedes this question] of March 31, 1776 , John Adams wrote the following. . . . Your letter was the first intimation that another tribe, more numerous and powerful than all the rest, were grown discontented. . . . . Based on information in Abigail Adams' letter, what is the "tribe" to which John Adams is referring? . . . . F. ancestors , , , , G. . . . husbands . . . . H. ladies . . . . I. tyrants." [The correct answer is (H).]

For most of us the equation of "ladies" with "tribe" makes perfect sense on the surface. But who of us could explain to a literal-minded seventh-grader (many of them are still just that) exactly why this is so? And how on earth could we use a current dictionary to get our point across? Or in more focused, practical terms, what can parents and teachers do that will help literal-minded young Americans to recognize and comprehend multiple-meaning possibilities in what they read and hear?

Locating dictionary entries to produce FCAT-style test questions . . . . As far as practice testing goes, our best source is clearly a dictionary entry the illustrative quotations and definitions in Johnsonian-style dictionaries like the OED, its shorter version, and other dictionaries. By way of illustration, here is an entry from a Johnsonian-style dictionary in which each definition (except 5) is followed by one or more illustrative quotations attributed, as with the FCAT question, to specific authors.

FLOURISH. ( Flour"ish ) v. i . [imp. & p. p. Flourished; p. pro & vb. n. FlourishinQ .] [OE. florisshen , flurisshen , OF. flurir , F. fleurir , from L. florere to bloom, fro flos , floris , flower. See Flower, and - ish .] . . . . 1. To grow luxuriantly; to increase and enlarge, as a healthy growing plant; to thrive. . . . . A tree thrives and flourishes in a kindly. . . soil. Bp. Horne . . . . 2. To be prosperous; to increase in wealth, honor, comfort, happiness, or whatever is desirable; to thrive; to be prominent and influential; specifically, of authors, painters, etc., to be in a state of activity or production. . . . . When all the workers of iniquity do flourish.Ps . xcii 7. . . . Bad men as frequently prosper and flourish, and that by the means of their wickedness. . . . Nelson . . . . We say of those that held their heads above the crowd, They flourished then or then. Tennyson. . . .

3. To use florid language; to indulge in rhetorical figures and lofty expressions; to be flowery. . . . They dilate. . . and jlourish long on little incidents. J. Watts. . . . 4. To make bold and sweeping, fanciful, or wanton movements, by way of omament , parade, bravado, etc.; to play with fantastic and irregular motion. . . . impetuous spread the stream, and smolcingflourished o'er his head. Pope. . . 5. To make ornamental strokes with the pen; to write graceful, decorative figures. . . . 6. To execute an irregular or fanciful strain of music, by way of ornament or prelude. . . . Why do the emperor's trumpetsjlourish thus? Shakespeare.

FCAT-style test question possibilities . . . . Our FCAT question offered test takers one specific sentence context accompanied by four possible definitions. In contrast our FLOURISH-entry permits us to offer plenty of pre-ordeal practice to worried test takers, namely, seven possible sentence contexts accompanied by five possible definitions, along with the opportunity to check our dictionary source (OED, etc.) for the correct answer.

By way of illustration here is a single FCAT-style test question (out of many possibilities) with four definitions and one contextual target-sentence. . . .

Please indicate WHICH of the accompanying definitions for FLOURISH (1, 2, 3, or 4) BEST matches up with what the word actually means in the sentence, "Bad men frequently prosper and flourish, and that by the means of their wickedness."

1. To grow luxuriantly; to increase and enlarge, as a healthy growing plant. . . . 2. To be prosperous; to increase in wealth, honor, comfort. happiness. or whatever is desirable; to thrive; to be prominent and influential; specifically, of authors, painters, etc., to be in a state of activity or production. . . . 3. To use florid language; to indulge in rhetorical figures and lofty expressions; to be flowery. . . . 4. To make bold and sweeping, fanciful, or wanton movements, by way of ornament, parade, bravado, etc.; to play with fantastic and irregular motion.

Using Johnsonian questions to develop objectively verifiable multiple-meaning fluency . For all its virtues, our FCAT "tribe" question's correct answer cannot be objectively verified. It is a professional test maker's answer, very much like the "correct" interpretation of a poem from a professional literary critic or literature instructor. Accordingly, preparing professionally "correct" tests like these is largely a matter of trying to predict what sort of answers will please the judges, as opposed to the direct study of multiple-meaning words in the English language.

As we have seen, though, the answer to our Johnsonian question can be checked against the actual dictionary entry for the word. It follows, then, that any student who simply reads at normal speed (300 words per minute) a hundred of such dictionary entries will do better on a short entry-based test than one who has spent the same amount of time (5 hours) reading and discussing the use of figurative language in poetry. By the same token, we can also predict that students who spend as little as 20 hours in this kind of study will on the whole outperform comparable groups on the FCAT and similar multiple-meaning comprehension challenges.

By way of a first step toward building multiple-meaning awareness, here are ten multiple-meaning words chosen in sequence from the first part of our Bill of Rights: establishment, exercise, abridge ( ing ), arm (s), effect(s), warrants, answer, capital, infamous, and jeopardy. As a preliminary test, interested readers can start by guessing how many numbered definitions are listed in, say, Webster's New World ( 3 rd ed.) for each of these: 1-3; 4-6; 7-9; 10 or over. More ambitiously, they can check each word against its dictionary entry and identify the number of the most appropriate definition with respect to its specific use in the Bill [the number of numbered definitions for each word is given below).

Multiple-meaning skills and reading speeds . . . . Multiple-meaning skills are not the only dimension of reading skill. But they certainly play a major role in high speed reading comprehension and effectiveness, along with the capacity to recognize multiple part-of-speech membership and finite verb forms, both of which lie properly in Dr. Johnson's lexicographical territory, far more so than in Noam Chomsky's boundless domain of "Nature and Language."

Right now, according to Frank Smith and other reading experts, the average American reading speed is 250 words a minute, less than half the recreational speed of 600 words per minute that prevailed as recently as 1970, according to Fred Thompson and others. It's of course true that Dr. Johnson himself famously defined a lexicographer as a "harmless drudge." But I certainly hope what's here convinces Americans to take lexicography, dictionaries, and dictionary-based testing far more seriously than has been the case recently.

To underscore the point: Up until 1960 most students taking freshman English had to buy a dictionary and bring it to class by way of indicating how seriously words and their meanings were viewed at that time, including logical positivists and semanticists like S.I. Hayakawa. Looking ahead, let's hope, thanks to high stakes tests like the FCAT, that hands-on lexicography will again take center stage in the American consciousness.

TO CONCLUDE. . . . The American vocabulary, no doubt about it, is a big, monstrous thing: hard to spell and hard to learn. But the real challenge is not its number of words but the number of different meanings each ordinary everyday word has, as indicated by our Bill of Rights listings below. Underneath it all multiple-meaning awareness shows up as a sense of humor (puns, etc.) in our children and in ourselves. Surely that's reason enough for us to take our words - and our dictionaries - very, very seriously these days.

[Bill of Rights words followed by number of definitions: establishment-5, exercise-13, abridge( ing )-4, arm(s)-14, effect(s)-10, warrant(s)-5, answer-17, capital-15, infamous-3, and jeopardy-2]