Dictionary Society of North America

DARE celebrated in the Wall Street Journal

So many bloggers, newspapers and other media have been celebrating the completion of the fifth and final volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English that this blog hasn't even tried to keep up with the plaudits and commemorations. But the article in today's Wall Street Journal,  "Frog Hair to Woolies: Dust Bunnies by 173 Other Names," is particularly good. In addition to finding inevitable pleasure in the diversity of American regional English, it quotes DARE chief editor  Joan Houston Hall and Wordnik founder Erin McKean (both members of DSNA). Plus it has some great interactive graphics and photographs, including this one of founding editor Frederic Cassidy.

Lexicography Society at Columbia University

I've finally caught up with the new Lexicography Society at Columbia, whose messages about lively meetings and speakers have been mysteriously routed to my spam filter! But no more: I am happy to pass along the news that DSNA members Jesse Sheidlower and Madeline Kripke will be speaking this Friday, 17 February, on SCANDALOUSLY SEXY DICTIONARIES: SLANG LEXICOGRAPHY AND THE HISTORY OF THE F-WORD.Jesse Sheidlower will discuss the history of slang lexicography and the incorporation of obscenities in particular. Madeline Kripke will be showcasing some special items from her collection of over 15,000 volumes. Their presentation will take place from 1:00 to 3:00 pm in 709 Hamilton Hall, at Columbia (off Amsterdam Avenue). For more information on the Lexicography Society's meetings, contact the organization's founder and convener, Yin Yin Lu.

Lexicophilia

The 31 January New York Times reviews a new translation of the Kama Sutra; one piece of indispensible erotic advice will be old news to readers of this blog:

Among the “64 arts” a woman should master are "improvisation of poetry; knowledge of dictionaries; knowledge of prosody" and "reciting difficult verses."

A troop of baboons

The fact-checking organization Politifact Rhode Island has determined that an aggregate of baboons is not called a "congress," as claimed in a chain e-mail. After consulting dictionary.com, Merriam Webster, and Oxford, which shed no light, and Urban Dictionary, which was apparently updated using the chain e-mail as a source, the reporter sensibly sought the advice of both primate specialists and lexicographers, consulting DSNA President Orin Hargraves. According to the article, the proper term is "troop."  Using the word "congress" casts unfair aspersions on baboons.

Is there a collective noun for dictionary-makers? I propose "a fascicle of lexicographers." The term is both apropos and sufficiently obscure to send folks to their dictionaries.

Pity the harmless drudge

Reblogging is brisk with a New Year's Eve New York Times story about online dictionaries that "leave out the middleman"--"middleman" now being a synonym for "harmless drudge." Ann Eisenberg's story profiles Wordnik, the project of DSNA member Erin McKean, and the Corpus of Contemporary American English, compiled by Mark Davies, a professor at Brigham Young University. The pros and cons of lexicographer-free lexicography are thrashed out among experts including DSNA's William Kretsczhmar, along with Mark Liberman and Geoffrey Nunberg.   

Musical celebration of eponyms (with caveat)

 Start your Monday morning with this cheerful song: "I hope my name becomes a noun" by Adam Cole and Robert Krulwich (pictured) on NPR's website. Also featured in the video is Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary.

More reflections on outrage at dictionary updates

Linguist and historian Geoffrey Nunberg joins the conversation with an article in the New York Times. Nunberg compares the latest outcries to the rage that greeted Webster's Third New International, which celebrates its fiftieth anniversary this year. If you think folks get excited about OMG and muffin-top, how do you suppose they reacted when Philip Gove gave the OK to "ain't," cited Ethel Merman as a source, and, in the words of Wilson Follett, published a “fighting document” that was “out to destroy . . . every obstinate vestige of linguistic punctilio, every surviving influence that makes for the upholding of standards.” Read the rest of Nunberg's piece here.

More news of slang dictionaries

Right now Samir Rahim is complaining in The Telegraph (I found the story on the New Yorker's Book Bench blog) that established dictionaries shouldn't try to keep up with Urban Dictionary and the other slang lexicons, concluding with the admonition: "read online dictionaries for fun; read Chambers and the COD to get it right." Apparently the FBI didn't get the message; a story on The Smoking Gun website explains that the feds turned to the crowd-sourced lexicon to confirm that a slang expression posted by the suspect on his Facebook page was in fact a homicidal threat. (It has too many four- and ten-letter-words for this prim blog to report, but you can check out the original for yourself here.)  The FBI formally cited the Urban Dictionary in their complaint.

Of course, high school teachers have been using the Urban Dictionary for years to figure out whether their students are being disrespectful or hip. So now do they turn to the Concise OED?

Speaking of Project Runway...

The bowtie is out as DSNA's official uniform. Instead, how about wearing this ballgown, crafted from an old dictionary by Canadian teenager Tara Whatley:

 
According to an article in The Province (10 August), "the dress ... took 50 to 100 pages of newspapers, 300 dictionary pages, three feet of Velcro and four rolls of tape."

Confirming the vague ubiquity of the concept of "the dictionary," The Province doesn't inform us which dictionary was repurposed. Of course, the newspapers Tara used are identified...by the newspaper. Not by me.

Wrapping up the annual fuss over new words

Lexicography is a very predictable business. Four years as your executive secretary, monitoring the press and the blogs for dictionary news to share, has brought four rounds of local newspapers reporting that civic organizations are donating dictionaries to school children (invariably leading with an enthusiastic endorsement from a precocious nine-year-old).  I've read four years worth of December buzz about the Word of the Year. And with September approaching, it's time for the outbursts of shock and horror as Oxford, Collins, and Merriam Webster, among others, play Heidi Klum and announce "who is in and who is out." 

As I was procrastinating about reporting the uproar over the inclusion of "bromance" and "helicopter parent," or the ashcanning of "charabanc," I saw that the Visual Thesaurus was briskly reporting on the annual fuss, with a piece yesterday by Dennis Baron, on the new 150 words in Merriam-Websters's Collegiate Dictionary. They followed up today with a piece by Baltimore Sun copy editor John E. McIntyre, "who argues that journalists reporting on new words often misconstrue the purpose of dictionaries."

So instead of trying to write my own piece, I'll give you some tidbits of what other folks are saying. Hop on board.

Henry Hitchings at the Telegraph observes that, "Hostility to a new word (candidates from the latest Chambers might include “webisode” and “OMG”) is fraught with unarticulated concerns about class, politics, propriety and taste."

The Oxford WordsBlog claims to have added "goldendoodle" so they could include a cute picture of the aforesaid canine on their blog (it is very cute).

The Eight-Track Museum bans the Oxford Concise English Dictionary, in retaliation for dropping the word "cassette tape"--see the story in the Huffington Post.

And Erin McKean in an interview with ABC News reminds us that Wordnik never deletes any words.