(FORTUNE Magazine) – One regrets the recurrent temptation, thus far irresistible around our house, to argue with E.D. Hirsch Jr., professor of English at the University of Virginia. His basic proposition is sound. One applauds when he posits that countries are bound together not only by common languages and customs but also by shared bodies of knowledge. When he bemoans the disappearance from American curriculums of ''the traditional history, myth, and literature,'' one bemoans with him. We also admire his cleverness in promoting the idea that any culturally literate person needs to know certain things that happen to be listed in The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, composed by Hirsch and two other members of the professoriate and now appearing in a revised edition that, like its predecessor, is great fun to read and full of mistakes. The preface to the second edition starts off by expressing gratitude to the numerous kibitzers who have pointed up errors and omissions in the first (1988) edition, and claims to have thanked each one individually. Friends, the claim is false. The authors failed to thank Keeping Up for observing that the first edition was full of mistakes and mentioning several of them. They have now corrected the erroneous statement that President Roosevelt died after Nazi Germany surrendered (it was a month before), also the howler averring that Gummo Marx appeared in films (he was a Marx Brother only on the stage). But they have stubbornly clung to some other errors noted here. They still have Savonarola being burned at the stake when he was, of course, hung from a gibbet and then burned from below; and they still define the national debt as ''the amount by which government spending exceeds tax revenues,'' thereby confusing the debt with the deficit. A bit later in the preface they create another weird erratum in the course of explaining how much the world has changed since the first edition. ''In 1988,'' say the authors, ''the AIDS epidemic had just appeared on the horizon of public awareness. Terms like 'HIV' . . . were either unknown or heard only in the specialized conversations of medical biologists.'' Huh? As early as 1986, you could have done a Nexis search of news stories and articles and found 133 mentioning both AIDS and HIV. It remains dismayingly easy to browse through the book and find errors. The authors say that Khrushchev sent troops into Poland and Hungary in 1956. (He sent them only into Hungary.) They say Henry Clay ran for the presidency twice. (In fact he made five passes at the office and got on the ballot three times: in 1824, 1832, and 1844.) They say that an IQ score measures mental age divided by actual age, with the ratio multiplied by 100. (IQ testing abandoned the relationship between mental age and actual age several decades ago, and if it hadn't we would have no way of measuring adult IQs.) They say the ''Dow- Jones average'' (their incorrect hyphen) is ''an average of the selling price'' of selected stocks. (No, it's the sum of those prices divided by a constantly changing divisor.) The dictionary is truly terrible in dealing with business and economics. Numerous wobbly definitions -- Treasury bills are said to be ''bonds issued by the United States government'' -- leave a fellow instantly intuiting that he is in weak hands. The section on ''business and economics'' makes it clear that cultural literacy requires not even the most superficial knowledge of the corporate world. Exxon, American Airlines, Bill Gates, Alan Greenspan -- none make the list of 6,500 references presumed to be familiar to educated folks. Will business continue to be downgraded in future editions of the dictionary? Will Keeping Up get a thank-you note for this commentary? Anything is possible.