Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1994. [Vol. 2.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 22)

BOOK REVIEWS - Miklós Kontra: Vadon, Lehel: Országh IJszló. Eger: Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Nyomdája, 1994. 93 pp

fashion. Most lexicographers complied, inserting bolonyik, a word of Slavic origin known only to botanists; Országh didn't For several years after he retired from the University of Debrecen, he still visited high schools where his best students were English teachers. Hie famous professor whose name is seen on every Hungarian English learner's dictionary continued to visit high schools 100 miles from Budapest and to inspire teenagers to master English. In August 1994, I lectured in the Országh Memorial Section of the International Congress of Hungarian linguistics in Eger. After my talk a young man introduced himself to me and said he had several letters from Országh, who once visited his class and offered to start a correspondence with some pupils. In recognition of his bridge-building activities between the English and Hungarians, Országh was made Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 1979. No other Hungarian in Hungary has ever received such an honor. When a former student of his interviewed him for the Debrecen daily Hajdú-Bihari Napló, Országh gave the student a copy of a photograph taken at the ceremony in the British Ambassador's residence in Budapest. As he handed over the photograph, he wryly remarked that the editors of the Debrecen newspaper would probably cut off the bottom half of the picture, because the CBE medal hanging from the ribbon around his neck looked like a crucifix, at least to anyone who hadn't seen a CBE medal before. In the officially atheist Hungary of the 1970s a picture showing a cross on the hero of the interview could be deemed "religious propaganda". The interviewer (who is my friend) told me this story, and we both agreed that Országh was probably overcautious and exaggerating. We thought it most unlikely that even editors of the communist party daily would use the editorial scissors to "decrucify" the picture. Needless to say, we were naive, and Országh was, as so often, a realist The unmutilated photograph has since been published in No. 52 (1986) of the United States Information Agency's Hungarian-language periodical USA, and now in Lehel Vadon's excellent book on Országh. University teachers and students of English were a carefully selected and politically not very trustworthy minority before the dismantling of state socialism in Hungary in 1989. It was no big deal to know almost everybody 182