Dictionary Society of North America

Ojibwe People's Dictionary

Following on last week's news of the Talking Dictionary project, here's another endangered language finding a home and (literally) a voice online. According to The Ojibwe People's Dictionary, the lexicon is "a searchable, talking Ojibwe-English dictionary that features the voices of Ojibwe speakers. It is also a gateway into the Ojibwe collections at the Minnesota Historical Society. Along with detailed Ojibwe language entries and voices, you will find beautiful cultural items, photographs, and excerpts from relevant historical documents. Whenever possible, we provide examples of documents in the Ojibwe language."

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.   

CFP: "Digital Dictionaries" at MLA 2013

"Digital Dictionaries." Call for papers, Modern Language Association annual convention, Boston, January 3-6, 2013; Lexicography Discussion Group.

Dictionaries once stood apart, as bound paper; now they gloss digital text digitally. Who uses which ones? Who compiles them? How good are they? What difference does it make? Abstracts by March 1, 2012, to Michael Hancher.

Tergiversate

Now, I have to hand it to Dictionary.com, tergiversate is a great word. When I was in third form, I compiled a list of new and cool words as I encountered them in my reading, and I still remember that one of them was tergiversate. (Two others were haruspex and trireme. I must have been reading ancient history.)

Dictionary.com has chosen tergiversate as word of the year, eschewing neologisms and, as Jay Schwartz, Dictionary.com's Head of Content told The Huffington Post: "We think that it's immensely rewarding to find existing words that capture a precise experience, and this year, tumult has been the norm rather than the exception."

Oh--what does it mean? Flip-flop, equivocate, turn your back. Tergiversate, o man, foreswear thy foolish ways!

e-Lexicography published

DSNA member Pedro A. Fuertes-Olivera has co-edited a collection entitled e-Lexicography: The Internet, Digital Initiatives and Lexicography. According to the Continuum website, "The book looks at current research and future directions in e-lexicography. Online dictionaries and reference tools are increasingly prevalent in a digitized and internet-led era in language study that has embraced computational linguistics. This book responds with theoretical and practical analysis of key topics, from a global range of contributors." A blurb by DSNA member Gilles-Maurice de Schryver says that in e-Lexicography: "Exciting pointers to the future of our discipline are explored by a string of respected scholars, and unlike similar studies, a serious attempt is made at also embedding the (future) discipline into a theoretical framework." More information is available from Continuum.

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?

Google Dictionary makes a quiet exit

The blogs are reporting that Google has replaced Google Dictionary with a looking-up function integrated into web search. Here's one account of the innovation. Lamentation and gnashing of teeth may be heard on the Google support forum, but then, as Dr. Johnson says, "All change is of itself an evil..."

Assyrian flourishes

The Associated Press is reporting that the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary published online in June by the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute has already been downloaded more than 100,000 times.

Beach-reading? 

Video of Lexicography and Digital Humanities lecture

As requested, I'm posting the link to a video recording of Toma Tasova's lecture "Lexicography Revisited: Dictionaries in the Age of Digital Humanities," which was presented at the Brown University Center for Digital Scholarship on 27 April.