The Lexicographer's Rules

Nick Paumgarten of the New Yorker discusses Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home, a style and etiquette guide for email writing.

Get your mind in the mood for languages. "Last month I stood before my Applied Linguistics class and gave students the accumulated wisdom: If ‘critical period’ means a sharp decline in learning ability, it does not exist. There is simply a progressive decline from birth to death as people mature. Resistance to a new language increases with the maturation of known languages because brain circuitry interprets any new input in terms of the patterns of known languages.…A hand went up.…‘Haven't you told us that under some circumstances, such as multiple personalities, hypnotism, and unusual patterns of cerebral dominance, adults can muster up new languages with very little constraint by maturational processes?’ She was right. I have said those things."

Lexicographer Robert Barnhart, son of Clarence and brother to David, both also lexicographers, died this week. Robert is best known for the Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology, three editions of the Barnhart Dictionary of New English, the Barnhart Abbreviations Dictionary, and, with his father, the World Book Dictionary.

Quibbling point: the story linked above calls him a “dictionary author” and says he “wrote” dictionaries. That’s fine, though it’s usually better to say that someone “edited” or “compiled” a dictionary.

Officers receive tips from Israelites. “As for the airports, Israelites have several security checkpoints, unlike America where there is one. Passports are checked anywhere from five to seven times. They don’t require people to take off shoes or belts because they are so used to profiling people.”

Quibbling point: The demonym for the inhabitants of Israel is Israelis. Israelites were a people of the pre-Christian era.

Nathan Bierma writes about meh in the Chicago Tribune. My quote is unremarkable.