What quality means

Even the dictionary finds it difficult to explain the meaning of the word quality. It has to use other words like excellence. Why is quality so hard to define? Is it because it is such an abstract word and can mean so many different things? Or because its meaning depends so much on what it describes? How can you define high qual­ity when applied to the things you buy, for example, a pop record, a pair of shoes, a meal in a restaurant? You'll probably have three different definitions of quality for the three different things. Quality is also hard to define because it can be such a subjective word — it means quite different things to different people, even when they use the word to describe the same tiling. A Pink Floyd album may in your view have quality, but your friend may con­sider that the same album is a waste of good money. Yet another problem is that the meaning of quality changes over the years. Things which you think have quality may not be seen in the same way by older people. Just ask your grandmother what she thinks of the Stones? For exam­ple, consider the two ads. Both advertise clothes for men. Advertisers stress the points which they think sell qual­ity to prospective buyers. The selling points that are stressed in 1897 ad are durability, craftsmanship, de­pendability, tradition. What about the ideas of quality in the present-day ad? Present-day ads do not talk about tradition or craftsmanship, dependability or durability.

They stress the virtues of newness, of being different, sometimes of being way out. Cheapness may be empha­sized too, the fact that almost everyone can afford the product. Does this mean that quality in manufactured goods is disappearing now that most things are mass-pro­duced?

Dictionaries

We all know the saying of a wise man who lived more than two thousand years ago: «Of making many books there is no end». If he had been living today, he might have said the same of dictionaries, for several new ones appear every year. They are needed for various purpos­es. Even in our own language we often find it necessary to look up a word, sometimes for the spelling, sometimes for the pronunciation, or it may be for the meaning or origin of the word.

In the twentieth century, with the remarkable increase in scientific and other knowledge, special dictionaries have to be made for special groups of words — commer­cial, technical, psychological, medical etc. There are some very large dictionaries which are supposed to con­tain all the words of the language, but they are not con­venient to use. They are too heavy and take too much room. If you are studying one subject, it is much better to have a dictionary which is no bigger than an ordinary book.

Students of a foreign language need a dictionary which ontains all the words in common use in their own lan-uage and the one they are trying to learn, that is, the ords they are likely to hear in conversation, and on the adio, and those they will meet in the books and newspa-iers they read. Such dictionaries usually give the mean-ng of a word by translating it; and, sometimes, but not always, they give translations of phrases and structures. Dictionaries of this kind are useful to translators, but less useful to earnest students of language than diction­aries which give meanings and explanations and exam­ples in the foreign language itself.