The Lexicographer's Rules

Joan Hall, editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English, forwarded this link to the email list of the Dictionary Society of North America: The Gifted in Pursuit of the Valued from Americana Exchange.

It’s a long, contemplative story (including an audio interview) about Madeleine Kripke, a New York City rare book dealer and antiquarian who specializes in dictionaries. Her collection is staggering: more than 20,000 items. Few libraries have anything like it, not only because of her particular taste and knowledge of the works she collects, but because her works are often for sale to lexicographers and, better, she often will loan them to lexicographers who are doing lexical work or research, as you can see in Simon Winchester’s The Meaning of Everything, a book about the Oxford English Dictionary,  where he writes that she “kindly copied many rare papers and documents from her immense collection of dictionaryalia, and offered much sage advice.“

I know Madeline through the Dictionary Society of North America. This year at our biennial meeting in Chicago there was a silent auction for a number of reference works that had belonged to the now defunct dictionary department of the publisher Scott Foresman, now Pearson Scott Foresman, which graciously donated them for the benefit of the Society. Madeleine beat me out on a complete bound set of the Middle English Dictionary at $300, but I’m happy to say that I did score an entire set of the Scottish National Dictionary (available online as part of the Dictionary of the Scots Language) for a very reasonable $75.

In any case, do read the article. The descriptions, written by Madeleine herself, of her rare and interesting works are tantalizing.

One of the more interesting aspects of the new Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is that the editorial team, lead by Angus Stevenson, (not Jesse Sheidlower, as mistakenly reported by the American Spectator; Jesse is only doing publicity for the new edition) chose to remove the hyphens from many words. BBC has a fairly decent story about it, and gives these changes:

Became two unhyphenated words
Fig leaf
Hobby horse
Ice cream
Pin money
Pot belly
Test tube

Became one word
Bumblebee
Chickpea
Crybaby
Leapfrog
Logjam

I should also add that if cost is not an object, the Shorter is the dictionary I recommend as a reliable dictionary for household, office, or school use. It does tend to skew a bit British, but with the latest edition, I gather that much more attention has been paid to making sure that North American terms, meanings, and pronunciations are included.

If you’re more price-conscious, I now recommend Webster’s New World College. This is a change over past recommendations.

If you insist on a free dictionary, then I recommend OneLook, where you’ll find several reliable dictionaries indexed and searchable from a single interface (including my Double-Tongued Dictionary).

Found on Boing Boing, Brian Dettmer carves up reference works so that the flat images on interior pages take on shape and form.

The Fort Worth, Texas, Star-Telegram has asked its readers for “family words,“ terms they believe to be coined and used only by them and their relatives. The idea was spawned, of course, by Paul Dickson’s Family Words: A Dictionary of the Secret Language of Families. It’s really a fascinating list, in a way that lists of words coined for contests or coined to make the coiner become famous or seem clever almost never are. Paul’s book is pretty good, too.

The main reason, I think, that I enjoy this sort of word list more than just about any other is because most of the terms were accidentally or organically derived out of circumstances. That is, nobody stood around going, “We need a word for this! Let’s think up something funny!“ Instead, something happens, it becomes a bit of a family in-joke or legend, and then a shorthand for the whole circumstance naturally springs up. That’s how most new words are really derived. They don’t come from contests and self-loving comic coiners.

From a lexicographer’s standpoint (rather than from just a word geek’s standpoint), the best thing about lists like these is that in a good number of cases, the words aren’t limited to the families which claim them but are, unbeknownst to them, rather widespread. That, plus the fact that family word self-reporting is somewhat more accurate than surveying people about other kinds language, means the lists are pretty good starting points for further research.

(The reason this kind of self-reporting is marginally better is that the words reported tend to have already withstood the test of time and usually still have currency. They can offer reliable examples of how they’re used and what they mean.)

By the way, do you want to know a secret about how you can quickly judge the value of a list of words someone has printed, posted, or emailed? I mean, judge them according to whether anyone really uses them, whether they have real world usefulness, whether they will withstand the test of time, and whether they will spread further?

Here it is: First, count the blends, where two words are combined to make one. Second, count all the entries that are supposed to be funny (I write “supposed to be” because blends almost never are). You can almost always tell if they’re supposed to be funny because there are bad puns, there are exclamation marks, something Sunday-school-naughty is implied, or the author or forwarder has even told you that they’re supposed to be funny.

Add those two totals together. If most of the words on the list have either or both of those traits, then you can move on to something else. The list probably won’t be worth the time it takes to read it. A practiced lexicographer can eye this sort of stuff accurately in seconds.

I am excited to find out about the Jamaican Lexicography Project (Jamlex), which hopes to produce a Jamaican National Dictionary to succeed and improve upon the Dictionary of Jamaican English compiled by Frederic G. Cassidy and Robert B. Le Page and the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage by Richard Allsopp.

The project is run by Joseph Farquharson who, according to his personal web site, is a doctoral fellow in the Department of Linguistics of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Joseph has released the first Jamlex appeals list, about insects:

In bold and italic font you will find the word written using an English-type system. This is followed by the same word written out in the special writing system developed by Frederic Cassidy around the middle of the last century, and recently revised by the Jamaican Language Unit, at the University of the West Indies, Mona.

appeckeh (apeke)
boobo (bubu)
bugaboo (bagabu)
iniquity (inikwiti)
gingy fly (ginggi flai, jinji flai)
jiji-waina
kitty-boo (kitibu)
moonie (muuni)
news bug (nyuuz bog)
pity-me-likkle (piti-mi-likl)
rain fly (rien-flai)
titty biter (titi-baita)
tumble bruise (tombl bruuz)
tumble turd (tombl tod)