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228 MODERN DRAMA September Finally, there is a weakness in the Concordance which is not at all the fault of J. Russell Reaver. It points up a major problem in O'Neill scholarship. There is no good edition of O'Neill's collected plays. J. Russell Reaver had to use the Random House edition because that is the only available collection through The Iceman Cometh. And so, of necessity, the Concordance repeats all of the many-toomany errors in the Random House edition. O'Neill pointed out to his publishers years ago that Cybel's chewing gum in The Great God Brown like a cow "forgetting time with an eternal end" is meaningless and should read "with an eternal cud." But it and myriads of other misprints have never been corrected, and all are reproduced in the Concordance. Certainly J. Russell Reaver is to be thanked for taking on a hard job for a laudable end. With all its sins, the CQncordance is better than nothing-and nothing is all there was before it. DORIS ALEXANDER THE DISCORDING OF EUGENE O'NEILL: A COMPANION PIECE. Anyone examining Mr. Reaver's O'Neill concordance or reading Miss Alexander's review of it might well·· conclude that computers are worthless beasts of burden, at least outside of the scientific or commercial enterprise. It would seem that they are incapable of producing readable print, even to the extent of using lower-case letters and distinguishing question marks from dollar signs, that they produce frequent misprints, that this magic box about which we've heard so much is, of all things, guilty of gross inconsistency, that this giant brain cannot even recognize hyphenated words and unhyphenated word compounds like "Buenos Aires" or distinguish among homographs ("ART') Yet, all of these shortcomings are the result of human failing, ranging from incredibly sloppy proofreading of the texts of the plays to a failure to use appropriate methods and machines. Take the matter of readable print, for example. Many university computer cen· ters have printers with both upper and lower case characters, all of the standard punctuation characters, plus many nonstandard characters. The fact that one's local computer center does not have such equipment means simply that the final printing (the least expensive part of the project) should be done elsewhere. Problems of inconsistency pointed out by Miss Alexander arose, apparently, through an understandable desire to keep certain words from being concordanced. One does not want all of the uses of "the" listed, for example. Just how many grammatical words should be left out is a matter of judgment, but there is no reason for inconsistency. Even given linguistic naivete on the editor"s part, he could at least have consulted the omitted-word lists in the series of concordances published by Cornell University Press, which have been coming out for some years now. One also wants to omit, in a drama concordance, names of characters used only to introduce speeches, but not the same names when they appear within speeches. This could easily have been done by an intelligently designed computer program. Hyphenated words can also be well handled by a decent program. A word like "middle-aged" should be listed as is, with a "see also" comment under "aged." Similarly, double words, like "Buenos Aires," can be entered with an invisible hyphen, that is, with a character not otherwise used which would keep the words together during the concordancing process without its being printed in the final copy. 1970 BOOK REVIEWS 229 Homographs present a problem, but not an insurmountable one. The concordance needs to be listed, proofread, edited, and reprinted in any event. Why then not simply rearrange or omit homographs during this post-editing phase? Thus "tin can" could be left in and "He can?" edited out. Instead, Reaver seems to have left out all uses of "can" and, inexplicably, included uses of "cannot." If the Q'Neill Concordance were the first computerized one ever produced, it might be forgiven most of its errors of ignorance. But consider that a half-dozen such works have appeared in the literary field alone and that much information on the techniques of concordance-making has...

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