The Lexicographer's Rules

The Wisconsin State Journal has a good article about the Dictionary of American Regional English. The dictionary is so often the source for answers to queries we get on the radio show, that I hope DARE does a concise edition when they're finished with the fifth and final volume. I'd like to see more people have DARE's information at hand. Many libraries do have the full volumes (as all North American libraries should), but the set is probably beyond the means of the non-specialist.

I’m looking for a few people who are interested in learning about hunting for words by way of helping out with the Double-Tongued Dictionary.

The task has grown ever larger during the nearly three years the site has been public. There are more places to hunt and more ways to do it. Our traffic continues to mount, too, and ever more people are signing up for the email list and RSS feeds, so the audience is also more demanding.

Basically, you’d help find new and newish words, and new meanings for old words, or any word that is not included in a mainstream dictionary. More details upon inquiry.

It’s simple work, though a bit tedious. It’s also a pretty good introduction to one of the most basic steps of dictionary-making, as well as a good start at making a reader more aware of new language, and of reading differently. Very differently. Holding your face in front of the zeitgeist firehose can be so intense that you have dreams about word-hunting. You may also find that when you empty your pockets at the end of the day that there’s a flurry of paper scraps, each scribbled with a word worth recording.

If you’re interested in regularly helping out, drop me a line with a few notes about who you are and why you’re interested. I’m sorry to say that there’s no pay involved, just thanks and a link on the “About” page.

I don’t even know where to being with describing what’s wrong with these bogus etymologies, so I’ll just repeat what I wrote in the comments there.

About a quarter of these are provably false, another quarter are unsubstantiated rubbish that’s been repeated without verification for years, and most of the rest take liberties with correlation and causality that render them useless. You’d best stick to hiking in the woods. Maybe a bear will eat you and save us from more uninformed nonsense ripped off from unreliable sources.

There's a nuanced post over at Assistant Village Idiot about how claims of language victimhood don't make plausible etymological explanations more probable.

Linguistics is about proof; etymology is about probability. That's an unfair simplification, but it will do for now. Cassidy and others who wish to defend Irish honor in the field of contribution to English get quite caught up in the oppression aspect, and recognizing Gaelic roots of terms begins to take on an aspect of “We have to do this to right ancient wrongs. Damn the English and their dictionaries.” The more you read, the more you descend into the rhetoric and evidence of conspiracy theorists. Baseball writers used “jazz” early, baseball players were largely Irish, they went to Hot Springs Arkansas where there was an Irish population, they used the hot springs and came back to California talking about “jazz” as heat and energy—what more do you need for proof you English bastards?

Reinhold Aman writes in Language Log about the wide range of translations of Don Imus's "nappy-headed hos" comment. Not the least of the sins was failing to look up the words in American dictionaries and, therefore, incorrectly translating "nappy" as the British "diaper."