The Lexicographer's Rules

More reviews for my book have come in.

Dana at Linguistic Life had several nice things to say, and says “Grant’s reported to be one of the happiest lexicographers out there.” So! I shall never be called a young curmudgeon again.

Jan Freeman at the Boston Globe gives both the book and the web site a plug and says the book’s entries “are not mere barroom fancies.”

Steve at the blog Language Hat likes the book because he has “the quirk of insisting that the words actually exist” and those in the book do.

The review won’t be posted on the web site until next week, but Michael Quinion has sent a nice review on his 40,000-subscriber email list and posted it on his RSS feed. 

Any advocate of drastic spelling reform must have an insufficient understanding of just how differently English is spoken in the various groups that contribute to our various American English dialects. Which is why stories like this are such howlers: those paragraphs written in “simpler” spelling simply do not work in whole swaths of America. First, because they’re nightmares of craptastic phonetic transcription; second, because not everyone pronounces every word the same.

Slippery-slope logic suggests that after we have spelling reform, we’d have vocabulary reform, with one word for every thing, idea, or action, and only one thing, idea, or action per word. Imagine the naming committees getting together trying to figure out which bird species, exactly, is the robin, to the exclusion of all others.

But the first test of the self-appointed spelling reformers should be to decide whether cater-corner, catty cornered, or kitty corner is the preferred spelling. That’d keep them busy and out of further mischief for a few decades.

Thinking phonetic similarities between words prove origin or relation is a common mistake of amateur etymologists, as in this junk etymology, where the author, a known crank who favors simplistic and unverified Irish origins for a variety of English words—because he thinks American and English lexicographers have an anti-Irish bias—posits that bunkum comes from a buanchumadh, an Irish-Gaelic word he says means “perpetual invention, endless composition (of a story, poem, or song), a long made-up story, fig. a shaggy dog tale.” Of course, he provides no written citations of the word in English-language contexts. He’s got bupkus to prove his claim.

The author, Daniel Cassidy, used to post his rubbish to the email list of the American Dialect Society, but when his rickety logic and dubious scholarship couldn’t withstand the scrutiny of interested scholars and dilettantes, he took his quackery other places to people who don’t know any better.