The Lexicographer's Rules

I’m very happy to announce that my boy was born yesterday evening.

“We get hundreds of applications for every job we advertise. Too many to go through. But we have developed a strategy for dealing with them. Before scanning the CVs, we split the pile in two and chuck half away. After all, you don’t want unlucky people working for you."—Adrian Monick, Hiring horror stories….

Michael Montgomery, editor of the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English, sent along this announcement about his web site. There’s some good stuff there.

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Dear All,

This is to announce the launching of a revised version of my website on the English language spoken in Appalachia, which has been created through the gracious assistance of my home department (English) at the University of South Carolina. At http://www.cas.sc.edu/engl/dictionary/ you will find a range of resources for experiencing and exploring the speech of the mountains from West Virginia to Alabama.

Whether you are a college teacher looking for material to develop a unit on Appalachian speech, a researcher in another field wanting to learn more about the subject, or just someone who likes to have the ears bathed in traditional speech from time to time, you will find plenty of interest here.

This site includes a half-dozen papers I have written for a lay readership and more than twenty audio segments from the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina that were recorded by my late colleague Joseph Sargent Hall in 1939. Each recording has an accompanying transcripts with many terms that are highlighted and lead to dictionary entries with pertinent historical information and further quotations. A comprehensive annotated bibliography of more than 600 items offers nearly endless opportunities for continuing study of the history, vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, naming patterns and practices, use in literature, attitudes and perceptions, and other facets of the region’s English.

I would be proud for you to spend some time with this site and to pass this announcement along to anyone else who might have an interest in it. And of course I encourage suggestions for additions and improvements at any time (yes, I know that some of the links don’t work at the moment).

With best regards,

Michael Montgomery
Professor of English
University of South Carolina

This video on Streets Blog shows perfectly why I am against turning Sixth and Seventh Avenues in Park Slope, Brooklyn, into one-way streets.

It’s my neighborhood: I live between Sixth and Seventh Avenues on Park Place, more or less a block below Flatbush Avenue (the streets intersect at an angle, so we’re closer to Flatbush in one direction than we are in the other), which is a daily parade of stupid: Overly fast and overly aggressive drivers. Light-runners. Big trucks which sound their airhorns at all hours. Big trucks which use their very loud jake brakes at all hours. It’s a crappy, crumby, inhuman thoroughfare and it’s what I fear Sixth and Seventh Avenues will become. One way streets are fast, loud, dangerous, and unfriendly neighborhood-killers.

Jeff Prucher does a rare thing for a lexicographer: he lists words he didn’t include in his dictionary of science fiction terms, Brave New Words, and writes about why they didn’t make the cut. There are also sample entries of terms that were included.