The Lexicographer's Rules

From a rewritten press release (also picked up by the New York Times) is a passage spoken by a man who’s probably never studied Civil War letters, or any collection of letters written before the typewriter age:

Computers are second nature for today’s college students. They grew up with technology and the Internet. However, they also grew up with e-mail and text-messaging, which have undoubtedly eroded the fundamental writing skills needed in most professional positions. Shortened syntax, incomplete sentences and no punctuation may be acceptable for instant messaging between friends, but most offices require a much higher level of sophistication, even in e-mails between co-workers. It would be in college students’ best interest to enroll in more writing classes.”

I won’t argue the best point here, that students should take more writing classes, since I think everyone should take more writing classes regardless of their natural abilities, but abbreviation and indifferent punctuation have been going on for as long as people could write. As has good old mistake-making.

But that’s mild quibbling, perhaps, when there is a bigger fish to fry: the unsubstantiated claim that technology is to blame. There is no research I know of—and I am currently heavily reading up on this in preparation for some public presentations—that shows language is, has been, or will be eroded by email or text messaging. In fact, heavy users of those forms of communication have been shown to have higher levels of literacy and to practice more nuanced communication than their peers who do not use those modes of communication.

Be very careful if you choose to defend the sentence including “undoubtedly eroded”: “erode” doesn’t mean “to make people use language in new ways that I am uncomfortable with.” It means “to gradually destroy.”

But there’s a still bigger fish: there’s no study to back up the original press release. It’s a survey of 100 “human resources executives.” (A study is not the same as a survey, no matter how often journalists use them as synonyms.) The claim, as expressed by the Arizona Republic, that “Forty-five percent of survey respondents said written communication is where recent graduates are most deficient,” is meaningless. No matter how many HR execs think writing is a problem, it could be that only 5% of entry-level applicants need better written communication skills and that all the other complaints about entry-level applicants represent still smaller numbers of applicants.

I cannot find the press release on the Internet, including on the web site of the head-hunting firm that released it, so I cannot see if there are more complete numbers available.

For enlightenment about online communication, I recommend reading articles in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, which are freely available online.

Gallant: Clueful.
Goofus: Not clueful.

The Fort Worth, Texas, Star-Telegram has asked its readers for “family words,” terms they believe to be coined and used only by them and their relatives. The idea was spawned, of course, by Paul Dickson’s Family Words: A Dictionary of the Secret Language of Families. It’s really a fascinating list, in a way that lists of words coined for contests or coined to make the coiner become famous or seem clever almost never are. Paul’s book is pretty good, too.

The main reason, I think, that I enjoy this sort of word list more than just about any other is because most of the terms were accidentally or organically derived out of circumstances. That is, nobody stood around going, “We need a word for this! Let’s think up something funny!” Instead, something happens, it becomes a bit of a family in-joke or legend, and then a shorthand for the whole circumstance naturally springs up. That’s how most new words are really derived. They don’t come from contests and self-loving comic coiners.

From a lexicographer’s standpoint (rather than from just a word geek’s standpoint), the best thing about lists like these is that in a good number of cases, the words aren’t limited to the families which claim them but are, unbeknownst to them, rather widespread. That, plus the fact that family word self-reporting is somewhat more accurate than surveying people about other kinds language, means the lists are pretty good starting points for further research.

(The reason this kind of self-reporting is marginally better is that the words reported tend to have already withstood the test of time and usually still have currency. They can offer reliable examples of how they’re used and what they mean.)

By the way, do you want to know a secret about how you can quickly judge the value of a list of words someone has printed, posted, or emailed? I mean, judge them according to whether anyone really uses them, whether they have real world usefulness, whether they will withstand the test of time, and whether they will spread further?

Here it is: First, count the blends, where two words are combined to make one. Second, count all the entries that are supposed to be funny (I write “supposed to be” because blends almost never are). You can almost always tell if they’re supposed to be funny because there are bad puns, there are exclamation marks, something Sunday-school-naughty is implied, or the author or forwarder has even told you that they’re supposed to be funny.

Add those two totals together. If most of the words on the list have either or both of those traits, then you can move on to something else. The list probably won’t be worth the time it takes to read it. A practiced lexicographer can eye this sort of stuff accurately in seconds.

I am excited to find out about the Jamaican Lexicography Project (Jamlex), which hopes to produce a Jamaican National Dictionary to succeed and improve upon the Dictionary of Jamaican English compiled by Frederic G. Cassidy and Robert B. Le Page and the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage by Richard Allsopp.

The project is run by Joseph Farquharson who, according to his personal web site, is a doctoral fellow in the Department of Linguistics of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Joseph has released the first Jamlex appeals list, about insects:

In bold and italic font you will find the word written using an English-type system. This is followed by the same word written out in the special writing system developed by Frederic Cassidy around the middle of the last century, and recently revised by the Jamaican Language Unit, at the University of the West Indies, Mona.

appeckeh (apeke)
boobo (bubu)
bugaboo (bagabu)
iniquity (inikwiti)
gingy fly (ginggi flai, jinji flai)
jiji-waina
kitty-boo (kitibu)
moonie (muuni)
news bug (nyuuz bog)
pity-me-likkle (piti-mi-likl)
rain fly (rien-flai)
titty biter (titi-baita)
tumble bruise (tombl bruuz)
tumble turd (tombl tod)

A lost wilderness. “Squirrels are highly intelligent, agile enough to tightrope-walk along telephone wires, and poor conductors of electricity. Somehow they have realised that by biting through to the bare wires and short-circuiting the 50 volts that run through them into their own bodies, they can heat themselves up. In this way, Roger said, each squirrel becomes a sort of low-voltage electric blanket—and will sit up on the wires with a stoned smile for hours.”