Crude gloss-definitions are harmful if students don't also
learn that they are only first approximations that let you
start learning to get the feel of Greek syntax by reading
sentences and paragraphs.
I looked up gazillions of words in LSJ (and another
half a gazillion in Latin lexicons) during my BA and MA
studies. I also used Metzger's Lexical Aids at various
junctures and Goodspeed's Homeric Vocabularies. I learned
quick glosses for quite a few Homeric words while
waiting for Green Line trains in Boston. That time was
otherwise pretty hard to use constructively, and it made
for quicker progress when I could get back to my desk
and sit down with texts and lexicons. And I don't think
I ever suffered from the delusion that because I had
memorized a one-to-five word gloss for a number of
Homeric words I really had an exhaustive or even especially
adequate understanding of what those words meant.
That requires years of extensive reading in the primary
texts. Spending multiple hours looking up words in the
fattest lexicon you can find is no substitute for that.
But the memorized vocab lists helped me make a first
pass through the text without being driven to despair
by having to stop one time too many for flip pages in LSJ.
I would hate to see students forbidden to use such lists.
It's not as though we have so many of them clamoring
to learn Greek and Latin than we need to make the
learning curve steeper to thin them out.
Of course, the glosses should be as good as possible....
and such helps as are provided by the Perseus Project
may make it possible for some students today to have
the benefit of LSJ without all the page-flipping. Point-
and-click seems to be less tedious for some people.
And of course students (esp. NT students who will
otherwise stand up in pulpits later and say dumb things
about what various Greek words mean) should be taught
that etymology doesn't determine meaning, etc., that
any given dictionary definition is applicable only to
certain texts, etc.
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James D. Ernest
Senior editor, academic books, Hendrickson Publishers
Ph.D. cand., Boston College
S-MAIL: c/o Hendrickson Publishers, 140 Summit Street,
P. O. Box 3473, Peabody, MA 01961-3473 USA
FAX: 978/573-8243 PHONE: 978/573-2243
E-MAIL: jernest@hendrickson.com / ernest@bc.edu
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