The Lexicographer's Rules

Straightforward article from the Yemen Times listing nine ways words are made.

This article is so filled with rubbish I hardly know where to begin. I’ll just crush a bit of the low-hanging fruit:

Snoop Dogg…is credited with a form of rap-speak known as “shizzle.” Credited only by people who don’t know better. He merely popularized it. The “izz” infix is recorded in its current incarnation as early as 1982, when Snoop Dogg was just ten years old. Older, probably independently derived, forms date to at least as early as the 1930s.

The one millionth word is likely to be formed this summer. Absolute twaddle. We’re long past the millionth word of English, no matter how you define “word.” I believe there are millions of chemical names alone. Update: Ben Zimmer has gone into more detail at Language Log, basically saying: you can’t even count how many words there are in English. Like the national debt clock that used to be on Sixth Avenue in the New York City, any count given can only be an estimate. Ben calls the numbers in the Times article “exquisitely silly.”

Chinglish and up to 60 cousins such as Spanglish (Spanish-English), Japlish (Japanese-English) and Hinglish (Hindi-English) owe their rise largely to the internet. Ha! These glishes are all recorded in major language journals and elsewhere decades before the first web browser and before the pre-Web Internet left the labs and universities to become a household utiliity. Perhaps the phrase their rise might permit a begrudging acceptance of this “fact” but I think the many thousands of Puerto Ricans living in New York City before 1970 would disagree about whether, exactly, Spanglish became widely spoken because of the Internet.

(Source Link)

Nice word: piggin, defined in the 1913 Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary as “a small wooden pail or tub with an upright stave for a handle,—often used as a dipper.” The 10th and 11th editions of the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary still have it as an entry, although as this article points out, piggins aren’t as common as they used to be. The supposed origin of the word, as given in the article, is unlikely. The 1913 Websters explanation tracing it back through Gaelic is far more likely. (Source Link)

I finally received the iPod Nano given as a gift by Feedster! At the end of last year, they named Double-Tongued Word Wrester as having the third best feed of the year for 2005. The Nano is the prize for that. They even engraved it. Yay!

Now, I don’t want to seem churlish and ungrateful, but I hope they also soon fix their search engine so that if you click on the link for the last page in a list of results the database doesn’t always time out with “NULL Database link” or “We’re sorry but Feedster is temporarily down for maintenance. We’ll be back soon.” It’s almost impossible to see the oldest results turned up by a search for a term with more than a few months of history.

Incidentally, IceRocket has a similar problem. If a search turns up more than 50 pages of results sorted by date, it’s impossible to see pages 51 or higher. You have to do a custom date search instead to exclude recent results. IceRocket also does not always correctly display phrase search results: if you search for ”real life,” for example, more than a few of the result summaries do not show the phrase, but instead contain the separate words “real” and “life"—although the phrase is indeed inside the post if you click through to the result. But having to click through takes too much time—accurate summaries are really very useful for judging search results before clicking through to one.

I use both search engines, by the way, when trying to find earliest uses of slang words, especially those that seem to have arisen in the online world or contemporaneously with it.

I have just finished going through a copy editor’s queries on the manuscript of my upcoming book, The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English. I am late in returning the MS pages, but that’s because someone brilliantly decided to deliver them immediately before the holidays, when I was headed to Missouri for nine days and when, upon my return to New York City, I was off to Albuquerque for five more.

That’s not the sole reason the pages are late. Part of it is that it pains me to go through these queries because too many are, by and large, ridiculous. Some real errors have been caught and I am glad of that, and I appreciate the “better safe than sorry” ethos, but really.

Across the whole publication, because the copy editor failed to read the front matter—all dictionary editors know that nobody reads the front matter, which is why they can get away with recycling the same few articles in every edition, but you’d expect your copy editor to read it, particularly since it was part of the author’s instructions—there’s a proofing mark on asterisks in front of dozens of dates, as if they are wrong, when, in fact, as the front matter explains, the asterisks indicate that the date is uncertain.

Many of the queries have double question marks after them. Despite common practice, I don’t believe there’s a magnifying or doubling effect in using multiples of punctuation at the end of a sentence. It doesn’t make it seem like more of a question: not a better question nor a more revealing question nor a more serious question nor a more dramatic question. It just comes off like the inarticulate “WTF?!!!?” outrage of a 14-year-old.

On the entry for Trashcanistan the query says “This last example refers to Soviet Union/Europe, yet definition says Middle East countries only. OK?” Not OK. In fact, the definition says, “Afghanistan; any poor Middle Eastern country or central Asian republic.” Who said the former Soviet Union was exclusively in Europe? And why didn’t the copy editor see that part about central Asian republics?

At the entry for merk, there’s a direct quote from lyrics by Nas, “His moms had a stare I wouldn’t dare second look when I merk.” The copy editor wrote next to it, “Should ‘moms’ here be singular?” What kind of lily-white hole do you have to have been living in to not recognize that particular element of Black English?

At metric buttload, there’s a citation that reads, in part, “The Spanish have a ton of street cred.” The copy editor marked, “Is cred here OK?” It’s another one of those things I guess you wouldn’t ever learn until you reached your majority and your dad finally unsealed the fallout shelter so you could see what had become of the world.

There are more but the point has been made.