The Lexicographer's Rules

I finished adding all my books on my scrap list to my Amazon wish list. These are the books that I couldn’t find on Amazon (US):

Le pornithorynque est un salopare by Alain Créhange. (Mille et Une Nuits, 2004). Found on Amazon.fr.

A Persian Dictionary of Argot, Mehdi Samai (Tehran: Nashr-e Markaz Publishing, 2003).

Ard Al-Sawad (Land of Darkness), a novel in three volumes, by Abdel-Rahman Mounif. Recommended by Languagehat.  I could not find it on Amazon because it has yet to be translated into English.

For the Last Time, Learn English, by David Kendall (Nexus, 2004)

Diccionario de Modismos, de Ramón Caballero. (Librería El Ateneo, Buenos Aires, 1942).

Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas. Panhispanic Dictionary of Doubts. (Real Academia, Santillana, España).

Ami Konglish Uloitanv, by J.B. Sequeira. Covers Konkani and English.

Compendio ilustrado de lengua y cultura yanomami, (Illustrated Compendium of the Yanomami Language and Culture), by Marie-Claude Matt.

Dictionary of Criminal Slang published by the intelligence division of the Israeli police.

Diksyoner Kreol Angle (Ledikasyon Pu Travay, Mauritius).

Township Talk: The People, the Language, the Culture, by Lebo Motshegoa. (South Africa).

Dictionary of Media and Journalism, edited by Chandrakant P. Singh (2004).

La aventura del español in America, Humerto López Morales. (Espasa-Calpe, Madrid, 1998).

Comprehensive Slang Dictionary (Milon ha-slang ha-makif), edited by Rubik Rosenthal. (Keter, Israel, 2005).

World Dictionary of Hebrew Slang, Dahn Ben-Amotz. (E. Lewin-Epstein, Jerusalem, 1972).

Tesoro léxico de las hablas riojanas, José María Pastor Blanco (Universidad de La Rioja. Servicio de Publicaciones, 2004).

(Source Link)

Here’s something that peeves me like a six-wheeled peeling-and-peeving machine: newspapers reprinting email forwards without properly sourcing, dating, or citing them. It’s usually smaller newspapers that have no budgets and few staff, but still. How hard is it to properly find out where a chunk of text came from—a chunk of text that splatted in your inbox from the ether? Did not little green Martians bestow upon us Google for this very purpose?

A favorite to pass around in email and reprint in crappy newspapers everywhere are words taken from the Washington Post‘s Style Invitational in which readers invent new jokey words.

In some cases, the words are attributed to the Post, in some cases not. In this case, they claim “Here are this year’s winners.” Well, no. They weren’t the winners this year, nor when the list first appeared on Usenet in 2003, when they also were labeled “this year’s winners.” No, some of those words—like intaxication and reintarnation, appeared in the Washington Post in 1998. Others, like cashtration and beelzebug, seem to not be from the Washington Post at all. Sometime during their eight-year trip through the Internet, they were yanked from another list that has itself been travelling around since 1995, when it appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, an Australian newspaper. God and little green Martians only know where that list originated.

It’d all be different if they were, in fact, useful words, but they’re stunt words. They’re almost never used outside of these forwarded lists. They’re like pandas: good for a quick look, maybe an involuntary grin, and then you’re off to the monkey cages to speculate whether 43 bonobos could kill a silverback. Not useful.

(Source Link)

People claim to have coined words all the time that they clearly didn’t. Take this example. Peter Engel, the producer of the television show Saved by the Bell, says:

“You have to remember, our target audience was the 12- to 17-year-old age group…We invented the word ‘tween’…Parents trusted us with their children and we didn’t want to betray that trust.”

Maybe he meant “created the tween television market niche,” but no, he and his people did not invent the word. Tween, “a preteen or a young teenager,” dates provably to 1946 and perhaps as early as 1941. Tweenie, with the same meaning, dates to 1919 and Tweenager dates to 1949. 

(Source Link)

The back of a spoon is better for spreading butter than a butter knife.

Besides being a gold-mine of interesting words worth recording, this article is well-written and interesting, if a little too hagiographic. But who wouldn’t write like that about doctors and medics in a war zone?

“The enemy has perfected a new ploy: placing mortar tubes into buckets of water, which are then frozen and planted near the wire in the middle of the night. When the morning sun melts the water, the mortars drop, hit the bottom of the metal buckets, and fire. Because the pails vary in size, the water melts at different rates, producing the staggered firing effect.”

(Source Link)