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."

New editor of Dictionaries appointed

The Executive Board of DSNA is delighted to announce that Elizabeth Knowles has been appointed to a two-year term as editor of Dictionaries: The Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America. She succeeds William Frawley, who has edited the journal since 2006.

Elizabeth Knowles (pictured here with a learned friend) is a historical lexicographer who worked on the 4th edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993), and is currently editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (7th edition, 2009). Her other editorial credits include What They Didn’t Say: A Book of Misquotations (2006), and the Little Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs (2009). She is currently working on a book on the historical language for Oxford University Press, to appear later this year.

AP Stylebook annoints "Great Recession"

DSNA member Grant Barrett and DSNA vice president Orin Hargraves are quoted in today's Business Week, in a story entitled "‘Great Recession’ Gets Recognition as Entry in AP Stylebook." The article observes that "Barrett and some other lexicographers were skeptical about the timing of the inclusion, noting not only that the term has been used before for other economic downturns and also that even the Great Depression wasn’t widely used until years later. Still, they agreed this most recent period is deserving of additional recognition. 'It clearly is a shift in everyone’s perception of their financial and economic life,' said Orin Hargraves, a lexicographer who has consulted on the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Encyclopedia and is currently overseeing the new edition of the Scholastic Children’s Dictionary. 'Whether it’s a name that sticks, it’s too early to tell.'”
You can view the entire story here.

£834,350 for Names project

A major new research project led by the University of the West of England (UWE, Bristol) is set to create the largest ever database of the UK’s family surnames. The database, which will contain the meanings and origins of up to 150,000 UK surnames, is to be made publicly available and will be of enormous interest to home genealogists, family historians, and anyone interested in learning more about family names. The project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.The research will be carried out by Professor Richard Coates at the Bristol Centre for Linguistics at UWE with erstwhile DSNA member Dr Patrick Hanks. For more information from the AHRC, visit http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/News/Latest/Pages/familynames.aspx.

(Yes, Frida Kahlo doesn't have much to do with UK family surnames, but what a great image! It's My parents, my grandparents, and me [1936].)

"The gimmicky sideshow of the syntactic circus"

What a great line! Dan Zak of the Washington Post has written a delightful article on this week's American Dialect Society meeting. He not only reports on the selection of the 2009 word of the year ("tweet") and word of the decade ("google") but also on Steve Kleinedler's new tattoo! Check out the debate--sadly, no illustration of Steve's embellishment--at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/08/AR2010010803692.html. You can also visit ADL's more sober account of the proceedings, over which ADS executive secretary Alan Metcalf and American Speech columnist Grant Barrett presided, at http://www.americandialect.org/.

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.)

New lexicon of Louisiana French

The Dictionary of Louisiana French: As Spoken in Cajun, Creole and American Indian Communities is an 892-page lexicon of Louisiana French that takes into account regional differences in the spoken language. The book has just been published by University Press of Mississippi; associate editor and Indiana University professor Kevin J. Rottet is a member of DSNA.

From the story in the Opelousas (Louisiana) Daily World: One of the side effects of the project was the affirmation of Louisiana French in its many forms to be a true and legitimate language, despite its deviations from modern standard French, assistant editor and University of Louisiana history professor Barry Ancelet said. "A very important thing to understand about this dictionary is that what many people frequently described or assumed were deformations, mispronunciations or misuses or slurring, when we start looking into them, very often it turned out to be a preservation of an old form," he said. "One of the things this process proved to us is that our French is very well-rooted and in some cases, has precise distinctions and precise meanings contemporary French has lost." You can read the whole story at http://tinyurl.com/yedjkup.

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/.

More memories of William Safire

Here's a link to Maureen Dowd's column in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/opinion/30dowd.html?em). The bloggers are already quoting her report of William Safire's advice: "If White House officials wouldn’t call you back, leave them a single-word message about what you wanted to talk about: 'Malfeasance.'"

William Safire

The Pulitzer prize-winning columnist for The New York Times, formerly a speechwriter for President Richard Nixon, died Sunday, 27 September 2009 at age 79. William Safire had been a member of the DSNA since 1983. Here's a link to the Times obituary: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/28/us/28safire.html.

And here's an appreciation on the Visual Thesaurus: http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/2000/

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.

More awards for work on Hobson-Jobson

DSNA member Traci Nagle has won the Percy Buchanan Prize for the best graduate student paper on South Asia from the Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs, the regional sub-association of theAssociation for Asian Studies. With the award comes an invitation to re-present the paper, on her research on the origins of "Hobson-Jobson," at the MCAA's annual meeting in October. A version of this paper was presented at June 2009 DSNA meeting in Bloomington, and Traci's research was funded in part by the DSNA-Urdang Award. Traci is an Associate Instructor in the Linguistics Department at Indiana University and Associate Editor of the IU Linguistics Online Working Papers.

Johnson at 300: A Houghton Library Symposium

What a great symposium the Houghton Library presented last week! About 100 Johnsonians gathered at Harvard 27-29 August 2009, to discuss Samuel Johnson, his works, his circle, and his influence, on the 300th anniversary of his birth. A number of DSNA members participated, including Chris Pearce, speaking on Johnson's Dictionary and the illustrative quotations; Giovanni Iamartino, on Guiseppe Baretti and the Early Italian Reception of Johnson's works; and Lisa Berglund, who gave a paper on Hester Lynch Piozzi's British Synonymy.

Thomas Horrocks and John Overholt (acting and assistant curators of the Donald and Mary Hyde Collection) have put together a wonderful exhibition, "A Monument More Durable Than Brass”: The Donald and Mary Hyde Collection of Dr. Samuel Johnson," on view till 14 November 2009. You can check out the online version here: http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/houghton/exhibits/johnson/. The catalog will be available from Harvard University Press.

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/.

Euralex 2010

The 14th EURALEX International Congress will be held in Leeuwarden/Ljouwert, The Netherlands, 6-10 July 2010. The Congress will be organized by the Fryske Akademy (Frisian Academy). Speakers will include DSNA members Sarah Ogilvie, reading a paper titled "On Lexicography and Endangered Languages: What Can Europe Learn from the Rest of the World?" and Anatoly Liberman, discussing "The Genre and Uses of the Etymological Dictionary." Online registration for Euralex 2010 is open as of 15 August 2009 on the congress website: http://www.euralex2010.eu./

Wordnik beta site launched

Wordnik, http://www.wordnik.com/, "wants to be a place for all the words, and everything known about them." The project is helmed by DSNA members Grant Barrett, Erin McKean and Orion Montoya.

1,000,000th word foofarah

Well, I wasn't going to post about the supposed milestone, but as the Newspaper of Record quotes some of our members, here's a link to the article from today's New York Times' Week in Review section (is it a section if you access it online? Today I read the paper copy). I'm actually more interested in which library of dictionaries has been used for the illustration. Does anyone recognize it? Visit: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/weekinreview/14shuessler.html.

New books about language myths, slang, and more

The Boston Globe reviews a number of word books, with mention of volumes by DSNA members Michael Adams and Jeff Prucher, as well as investigation into the history of "shyster" by Gerald Cohen. Visit: http://tinyurl.com/o7s5sc.

Washington Post interview with Orin Hargraves

A Washington Post blog published this short interview on the occasional of the fourth anniversary of "The Language Lounge." To read the interview, visit http://tinyurl.com/6uy7s8. The address for "The Language Lounge" is http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/ll/.

Renewing Member Form

2009 DSNA Conference Program

Dictionary Society of North America XVII Biennial Meeting
Indiana University
27-30 May 2009

DSNA_program.doc