The Lexicographer's Rules

There are few things that brace one’s humility quite so well as sending an email with a profound typographical error in it to 1800 people.

On Wednesday, the managment of KPBS radio in San Diego, the producing station for A Way with Words, announced it would no longer produce the show.

As you can imagine, my co-host Martha Barnette and I, as well as our producer, Stefanie Levine, are disappointed. As were, apparently, thousands of listeners who have in just a few days called, emailed, and left comments on our new web site. The fire in some of those book-and-word people! Whoa. Many have also left passionate comments on stories on web sites of local newspapers and KPBS, and have signed up for our new email list, where we intend to announce news about the show. Because we will have news!

Our first news: we are already on the move to find a new home for the show.

KPBS management—which supports our efforts to continue A Way with Words elsewhere—made it plain that the show had everything good radio should have: quality content, a large (and devoted) audience, and good ratings.

What was the striking blow, though, was that the show is too expensive for a locally produced show. What was really needed was to make the show more national—it’s already broadcast in six other markets and is hugely popular via podcast—and thereby share the costs. The costs, in fact, are mostly very modest public radio wages (a synonym for “how do you like your ramen?”) without which it would be impossible to do a show of this caliber.

It’s difficult, however, for a station manager or program director to devote a disproportionate amount of time to taking a single hour of programming national when there are so many other shows and staff that also deserve attention. John Decker, the program director, and Doug Myrland, the general manager, did what they could with the limited time and resources they had. But it wasn’t enough.

One thing that has always delighted us is that when people from San Diego move to other parts of the country, they’re surprised that the show isn’t carried on the public radio affiliate there. They write us with comments like, “I thought the whole country could hear you guys. It sounds like an NPR show. I just assumed that, alongside Car Talk and Wait, Wait, everybody else in America was listening to A Way with Words, too.”

Which, of course, is a sound we have always strived for—even though our budget and staff are much smaller than those of the big shows. A Way with Words sounds like a big market show, thanks, in large part, to our editor Beth Accomando (who also has this amazing ability to make me sound like a pro).

So, we—Martha, Stefanie, and I—are picking up where John and Doug left off. We’re already reaching out to other stations, to other networks. You can keep up with our news by signing up for our email list on the new A Way with Words web site.

Thanks to everyone who has written or called with your support. As soon as our plans are fixed, we’ll put the word out.

You can read more about the station’s decision:

San Diego Union-Tribune news story.

KPBS press release.

In yesterday’s episode of KPBS’s These Days, station manager Doug Myrland had very nice things to say about the show.

Voice of San Diego.

San Diego’s CityBeat.

Linguist Eric Bakovic’s weblog.

Over the weekend I moved the site to a new service provider, one offering incredible high-speed hosting for database-driven web sites (and for less than a third of what I was paying elsewhere for dismal speeds).

EngineHosting has smartly shown that they understand that static web sites will soon be, if they are not already, outnumbered by database-driven web sites. So they’ve paid a lot of attention to making sure that the MySQL servers are top-notch.

As a result, I’ve been able to restore the full-blown search functions which are so very necessary for a site like this one. It makes finding things less painful

Over the next few months, I’ll be making substantial changes to the look and operation of the site, and hope to offer features like:

—rating of entries
—automatic look-ups in dictionaries at other sites
—customized searches across a wide spectrum of freely available online glossaries, lexicons, and dictionaries
—new categories of words being recorded
—RSS feeds for categories and subjects
—integration of unresearched citations and fully-researched entries
—a focus on visitor comments and community

I welcome your comments and suggestions. I do track what visitors do on the site and how they do it, but I’d appreciate your specific, detailed comments about what you’d expect to see here. Leave your suggestions here in the comments or drop me a line at editor@doubletongued.org.

My radio partner Martha Barnette and I are scheduled as guests on the BBC Radio Five show Up All Night. We’ll be taking language questions from listeners very much as we do on our own radio show, public radio’s A Way With Words.

If all goes as planned, we’ll be on Up All Night at:

2:30 a.m. Friday, July 6, in the United Kingdom, same as
1:30 a.m. UTC/GMT, Friday, July 6, same as
9:30 p.m. Thursday, July 5, in North America’s Eastern Time Zone, same as
6:30 p.m. Thursday, July 5, in North America’s Pacific Time Zone.

You can listen to the show directly on the Radio 5 web site. If you miss it, the show will be available for replay at the Up All Night web site and I’ll put an MP3 up here later.

UPDATE: I’ve now posted the audio of our segment as an MP3. It’s 49.6MB and 54 minutes.

Yesterday was the third anniversary of the launch of Double-Tongued Dictionary, then called Double-Tongued Word Wrester. The site has seen four redesigns, includes 13191 citations not assigned to a full entry and 1168 full entries, and spawned a book. Thanks to my regular contributors and commenters, to my advertisers, and to you, too.