The Lexicographer's Rules

Tomorrow morning I’m doing three radio interviews. If you’re in those markets, have a listen.

Update: Rescheduling of radio interviews is very common. The WYYY interview will now happen Thursday July 6. The interview on The Bear 97.9 will air tomorrow morning. The interview with Johnny Manson went off without a hitch.

Rick Gary and Kath Rowe Show on WYYY Y94 FM in Syracuse, New York. Should be on about 7:50 a.m. EDT. An Internet stream is is offered, but as of this writing I get dead air when I try it.

The Jet 105.7 FM (KJET) with Johnny Manson from Aberdeen, Washington, in the Seattle metro area, at about 9 a.m. EDT.

97.9 FM with “Hammer Hamilton” from Greenville, North Carolina at about 9:30 a.m. EDT. I’m not completely sure on this, as I only have partial information, but judging by the area code and local prefix of the phone number, and by the broadcast frequency, I think this station is “The Bear” WNBB from New Bern, N.C, well within the Greenville broadcast area.

Today around 3 p.m. I’m scheduled to be on the radio show Talk of the Nation, broadcast on public radio affiliates around the country. The web site says the topic will “examine how the Web has changed the way people research words,” but I imagine the discussion will stray and extend. Update: The show went very well. Geoff Pullum from Language Log and Martha Barnette from A Way With Words were also guests. We squabbled amiably.

I did a nice radio interview with Bob Hughes at WJON AM 1240 in St. Cloud, Minnesota, this morning. It was a good chat. He seemed genuinely interested in language and dictionaries and we had a real conversation instead of him throwing cookie-cutter questions at me and me throwing boilerplate answers back.

Misty Harris wrote a tight article about my book for the Canadian newswire CanWest. Ten Canadian newspapers picked it up—five put it on their front pages. That’s more a testament to Misty’s writing than anything else.

The Edmonton Journal has the story. You can also see a PDF of the front page and the jump.

Wake County school officials revised their book-use policy Tuesday which could lead to some popular and classic books being banned from their public schools.…Called2Action, a local Christian activist group, and some parents…[complained[ that the books contain “vulgar and sexually explicit language."…School officials said five books were formally challenged this school year, including…"Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang” by Jonathon Green.

Oh, Green’s dictionary definitely contains vulgar and sexually explicit language. But you don’t ban such books. You buy more copies and spread them around. Children are desperate for a resource they can go to for matter-of-fact answers about what words really mean. They may very well browse and learn some new terms, but where’s the harm in that? I learned all of mine on the school bus, reading my sisters’ torrid romance novels, and from my parents. A child only really has to hear his father say “motherfucker” once for it to take a permanent place in his brain. (It was 1983, Dad, and you were putting up the television aerial on the concrete steps out back of the house.)