Lexicography reading list on "The Reading Life"

The Reading Life blog for 2 March 2010 recommends popular works on lexicography--all are mentioned in DSNA's reading list, I think, but the blog's compilation is usefully annotated. If you have any suggestions for works I could add to our list, drop me a line.

Ben Zimmer is the new "On Language" columnist

Ben Zimmer, executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com, and a longtime member of DSNA, has just been named the "On Language" columnist for The New York Times Magazine. He will be replacing William Safire, another DSNA member, who passed away last year. Beginning with the March 21 issue of the Magazine, Ben will be writing the column on a biweekly basis.

The Visual Thesausus reports that: "Ben's writing about language has also appeared in Slate, the Boston Globe, Forbes.com, and the linguistics blog Language Log. William Safire frequently called upon his linguistic expertise, once calling him "that etymological Inspector Javert." He filled in as "On Language" columnist in 2009 when Safire went on hiatus due to ill health, and after Safire's passing he wrote a touching tribute in the Magazine entitled, "The Maven, Nevermore."

More on "distracted driving"

Citing the choice by Webster's New World College Dictionary of "distracted driving" as its word of the year, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood has announced an initiative to eliminate the practice in 2010. According to LaHood, the phrase's "rapid intrusion into our national vocabulary shows what an epidemic distracted driving has become."

No word on what the government intends to do about "unfriending."

Holy Writ

KINGSTON, N.Y., Jan. 3 (UPI) -- A judge in New York state took the oath of office with his hand placed on a dictionary rather than a book of scripture because officials could find no Bible.
The glitch, in a packed courtroom of the historic Ulster County Courthouse in Kingston, N.Y., provided "a light moment" in the swearing-in of Donald A. Williams as Ulster County judge, the Daily Freeman of Kingston reported Sunday. Williams said later he didn't mind using a dictionary instead of a Bible because the swearing-in Saturday was purely ceremonial. The former district attorney, a Republican, officially became the county judge Friday. U.S. government officials are not required to swear in on a Bible, but most do so as a demonstration of the binding nature of the promise. The act also adds solemnity to the ceremony. Most officials use their own family Bible.

Why doesn't the Times just outsource to DSNA?

What with the excerpt from and review of Jack Lynch's Lexicographer's Dilemma and Ben Zimmer's column on Antonin Scalia's distaste for "choate," the New Year's eve edition of The New York Times should have been running a credit line for DSNA. (Actually, the print version of Ben's column wasn't published till today. You can check out the hubbub at www.nytimes.com.)

Here, belatedly, is a link to the New York Times review of the new Romanian film “Police, Adjective” : "a story of law enforcement with a special interest in grammar. Its climactic scene is not a chase or a shootout, but rather a tense, suspenseful session of dictionary reading." You have to join to read Times stories but membership is free. (Credit the movie still to Marius Panduru/IFC Films.)

More Words of 2000-2009 -- dot.com flavored

Catchword, a naming company (wow, what a concept), has identified the 10 biggest dot-com naming trends of the decade-- and their picks for best and worst examples. Check out the story at http://search.sys-con.com/node/1229917 or the full version at http://tinyurl.com/yamx72w. (The company has no relation to the DSNA singing group.)

Affect, Esurient, Bush and Perseverence (Perserverence? Perseverance? hmmm)

Year-end tributes to popular words and neologisms continue with this press release from Dictionary.com: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/dictionarycom-reveals-its-top-searched-words-of-2009-78208067.html. Listing the words that its users most often looked up in 2009, as well as gainers, losers and most often misspelled words, the release suggests that these searches reflect "insights and trends." My graduate students, however, point out that searches often reflect classroom assignments ("Don't ask me how to spell the word, Jimmy, look it up!").

So what are elementary school students studying these days? Monty Python's Flying Circus? Ben Zimmer's commentary today on the Visual Thesaurus (http://www.visualthesaurus.com/) includes a gratifying link to the Cheese Shop sketch--which, he notes, is the only reason most of us know the word "esurient" in the first place.

And the Word of the Year from Merriam-Webster...

is admonish.

"Admonish shot to the top of the list three days after Rep. Joe Wilson's outburst during a speech made by President Obama, and it remained among our top lookups for weeks," said Peter A. Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster's Editor at Large. "When the House announced plans to 'admonish' Rep. Wilson, the word was understood to be technical or official, and it has been repeated often in coverage of recent contentious political issues. While this particular story wasn't very important in the context of a year's worth of news, it triggered enormous interest in this word." Visit http://www.merriam-webster.com/info/09words.htm for the rest of the story and the runners-up, including my favorite, "repose." I think of "repose" as Miss Congeniality.

New Oxford American Dictionary weighs in

The Word of the Year festivities continue: The New Oxford American Dictionary has friended "unfriend." Check out their blog, which explains the selection process and offers a gloomy list of the runners-up: http://blog.oup.com/2009/11/unfriend/.

"Distracted Driving" is one Word of the Year: Here we go

Webster's New World has announced that "distracted driving" is the word of the year, beating out such contenders as "wallet biopsy" and "too big to fail." Visit http://newworldword.com/ for the complete story, and check out the Visual Thesaurus's related commentary on hypallage, http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/2053/.

My word of the year is "relatable" meaning "sympathetic." My students are all using it. Alas! it's so limp.

Skulduggery in the citation files

Emily Arsenault's first novel has gotten mixed reviews but how can I ignore a mystery story based on lexicography? Here's Marilyn Stasio's (generally positive) review from the 15 October 2009 New York Times: THE BROKEN TEAGLASS (Delacorte, $25) is wordy. But what would you expect from a mystery set in the offices of a dictionary publisher? In her author bio, we learn that Emily Arsenault wrote this first novel to pass the long, quiet nights in the South African village where she worked as a Peace Corps volunteer. The comfort she took from words — funny words, strange words, words that should have been strangled at birth — is palpable in her oddly endearing coming-of-age story about a recent college graduate who lands a job as an apprentice lexicographer and discovers clues to an unsolved murder embedded in the citation files. Billy Webb and a young colleague, Mona Minot, become chummy when comparing multiple “cits” from a bogus book. As their relationship develops, so does the story of the killing, which they suspect was committed by someone in their office. “All those silent types,” Mona observes. “There’s gotta be a sociopath or two among us.” Or at least a very clever wordsmith.

Thesauruses, Dictionaries and Dachshunds

I've an assortment of lexicography news to share this morning:
Henry Hitchings, author of The Secret Life of Words and Defining the World has written an enthusiastic review of Oxford's new Historical Thesaurus of the English Language, which he calls "a monumental feat of scholarship [and] in a world infatuated with speed, ... a testament to the value of patiently accumulated learning." To read the rest of the article, visit the Telegraph at http://tinyurl.com/yz8ds2z.

Here's a wonderful photograph from the Boston Globe, illustrating an article on the Boston Book Festival. The photo, "Dictionary," is part of a series by photographer and MassArt teacher Abelardo Morell. The photos are collected in A Book of Books, Bulfinch Press, 2002.



And then there's this happy tale from aptly named El Dorado, Kansas: On Sunday, Michael Myers scratched off one or two Bonus Crossword instant tickets and found he'd won a top prize of $20,000. “I wanted to hide the ticket until I could claim it, so I put it in my dictionary under ‘M’ for ‘money,’” Myers revealed. “And then I put the dictionary up high. Doxies like to chew and I wasn’t going to take any chances.” (See the full story The El Dorado Times at http://tinyurl.com/yh2eeog).

Dictionary Day (happy birthday, Mr. Webster)

Here's Erin McKean's take, from the column she's now writing for The Boston Globe: http://tinyurl.com/yfa4jbs.

New edition of "The F Word"

The new Oxford University Press edition of Jesse Sheidlower's The F Word is getting a fair amount of play in the media. Here's a link Inside Higher Ed's interview: http://tinyurl.com/yc3m8s6.
At the same time, Jesse Sheidlower's 1 October 2009 article on "Why its so hard to put sex in the dictionary" has the blogs buzzing. The (very graphic!) article is on Slate: http://www.slate.com/id/2227971/.

Getting the Word Out (2)

More in our occasional series on DSNA and the popularizing of dictionary studies:

Michael Sheehan hosts a weekly radio call-in show in Traverse City, Michigan. The show, "Words to the Wise," is about language, and some of the most frequent questions are about words -- their meaning and origins. Michael writes, "I constantly tout dictionaries as marvelous repositories of information.What is most unusual about the program is that it is on AM radio. All of the other language programs that I have heard are on FM radio -- usually, PBS outlets. So I hit a strongly blue collar or retiree audience."

The show airs every Tuesday morning from 9:00 - 10:00 EST on AM-580. It can be heard anywhere in the world in real time on streaming audio. Simply go to wtcmradio.com and click on "Listen Now."A limited number of podcasts can be heard at any time by going to wtcmradio.com and clicking on "The Ron Jolly Show," and then "Words to the Wise."

Are Dictionaries obsolete in the Age of Google?

Julia Angwin argues in the Wall Street Journal that "We need a dictionary that is as dynamic as our use of the language... although Google is doing a pretty good job aggregating meanings, I would prefer some human experts to give authority and heft to a new database of meaning." Her column is practically a DSNA kaffee-klatch: see what I mean by visiting http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125209509231187233.html.

What's wrong with this picture?

Dressing the set of "Mad Men" with the OED may have seemed like a clever touch, but... as DSNA members Ben Zimmer and Orion Montoya point out, the designers needed to take a closer look at the dictionary's colophon... See Ben's entertaining article "Not so Mad Props: A 'Mad Men' Anachronism," at the Visual Thesaurus, http://visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/1961/.

"Street Smart": Urban Dictionary

New York Times essayist Virginia Heffernan has a lively discussion of the Urban Dictionary at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/magazine/05FOB-medium-t.html?ref=magazine. You must sign up to read the Times on line but it's free.