The aubergine and the dictionaries

When I lived in Germany in 1989 (yeah, I'm that old, shut it), I was learning several languages at the same time. My school required me to take two foreign language classes. Since I already spoke English, I couldn't choose English. So, I was learning French and Russian in German. I didn't do all that well. I rememeber very vividly having 5 dcitionaries on my desk in my room and poring over them every night trying to figure out what was being said in German and then looking it up in my German-French dictionary or Russian-German dictionary or my German-Latin or German-Greek dictionary (I was studying philosophy at the time).
One evening for dinner, we had something I'd never seen or eaten before. It was a sort of stew of which the primary ingredient was aubergine. Don't ruin the story for anyone else if you already know what an aubergine is. I didn't and, when I wanted to find out what it was, I discovered a problem with most dictionaries. A problem I recently encountered again.
I went to look up aubergine in my English-German dictionary. It wasn't in there. That's odd. So, I went to my French-German dictionary. But, aubergine is a French word. So, I got a handy little entry that said, 'Aubergine - n. f. l'aubergine'. Big help. Could Russian help me? Nope, aubergine was aubergine. I asked people in Germany, I asked people in the States, I asked other UK students in class, I asked anyone I could think of and literally no one I knew had any idea what aubergine was in English (if they knew what an aubergine was at all) or they just knew it as aubergine. I remarked to my friend, Frank, at the time that perhaps we just didn't have aubergines in America. To which, he replied, 'You don't have the moon in the States but it's in the dictionary.' Arguably wrong, but his point was well taken. I won't keep you in suspense any longer. An aubergine is an eggplant. An eggplant. Common enough that it should have been well translated. We'll leave for another time a discussion about my ignorance of an eggplant.
Dictionaries are way too generic in some cases to be helpful and it's frustrating for me as an American to know that most language dictionaries cater to the UK than the States because we just aren't a polyglot or polyglot-interested country (present company excepted). The statistics for foreign language usage by native English speakers in America are scary and abysmal. It would be nice to have dictionaries that focus on American English. But, it's a question of audience and ultimately, I can't blame the publishers for making a dictionary that appeals to their audience.
That brings me to my dissappointment this week. I recently purchased the Hippocrene Compact Dictionary for Arabic. I was happy to find a very small tome that could fit in the side pocket of my backpack. Imagine my frustration when I found that some very basic things were missing from it. Months, days of the week, verbs like think and a list of other things were missing from it. But inexplicably it had words like kleptomania, lunar and optician. The one positive thing I can say about the dictionary is that it has a really good and straightforward verb conjugation appendix that shows how to conjugate the four types of Arabic verbs. But that's not worth the $9 I paid for it.
If I had the authors in front of me right now, I'd tell them the story I just told you and then finish with chiding them to think about who will use a pocket reference. It's not someone who knows the language well. Write for the audience. It will make your works much more enjoyable by your readers and bring them back over and over again, even if what you write is just a dictionary.