The Lexicographer's Rules

Joan Houston Hall, editor in chief of the Dictionary of American Regional English, answers questions for David Medaris of The Daily Page in preparation for the Wisconsin Book Festival October 10-14, 2007.

What question has nobody ever asked you about DARE that you most wish someone would ask, and how would you answer it?

“How is it that you’re making such swift progress? The Oxford English Dictionary took much longer.” I would probably have to pick up my teeth from the ground before crying, “Oh, thank you for understanding what it takes to create a work like this!”

By the way, there are two dictionary-related holidays coming up. One is October 10, Frederic G. Cassidy Day, which the staff of DARE and others will be celebrating at the book festival. As Joan discusses in the article above, Fred was the long-time chief editor of DARE and he would have turned 100 on that day. An official proclamation was approved last year proclaiming that the official way to celebrate Frederic G. Cassidy day is to toss back a shot of rum (Jamaican, if you have it, since Fred was Jamaican) and shout “On to Zee!”

Also, October 16 is Dictionary Day, celebrating the birth of Noah Webster, who would have been 249 this year. The proper way to celebrate that is to stand on street corners reading your favorite dictionary entries to passersby. Lexicographers no longer carry out the airing of grievances: too many people were hurt by being whacked up side the head with Webster’s Third New International Dictionary.

My radio partner Martha Barnette, our producer Stefanie Levine, and I are as happy as dogs with two tails: we’ve struck a deal that will keep our radio show, A Way with Words, on the air.

Read more about it here.

We’re already working on new full-hour episodes, which will broadcast in San Diego and across the country as they always have. Spread the word!

Colleague and friend Erin McKean is guestblogging about dictionaries and lexicography this week over at The Volokh Conspiracy.

Part 1: The Myth of the Lexicographer-Judge. “The other myth about lexicographers is that we are horrified, appalled, and indeed, quite put out when we see misspellings, nonstandard usages, slang, or informality in general. This is ridiculous—it’s like expecting doctors to faint at the sight of blood.”

Part 2: Why Inartful Isn’t In. “When thinking about how words enter a dictionary, the most important thing to understand is that there are many, many more words than there are places in any current dictionary. Because of this scarcity, lexicographers are driven to a kind of triage. Often, the question isn’t ‘how can I justify including this word?’ but ‘How can I justify EXCLUDING this word?’”

Part 3: That’s Not a Word! “Words aren’t like Bigfoot: a moment’s glimpse of a fabled creature isn’t sufficient proof for cryptozoology. But just one momentary use is perfectly fine for determining whether or not a word is ‘real.’ The big question is what you can do with it, not whether it exists in the first place.”

Update:

Part 4: Dictionary Myths. “The beautiful thing about lexicography: it’s important, and you work hard to make the best dictionaries you can, but it’s not (as the joke goes) rocket surgery: the odds of someone dying because there’s a typo in an entry are very, very low.”

Clare Smith has fun in the Scotsman as she nominates her ten best Scottish words: bauchle, blether, dreich, fankle, gallus, mooch, pockle, slitter, wabbit, and wheesht. I knew only blether, gallus, and mooch (Western meaning, which I believe is the only one used in the US).

Two articles underscore the difficulties in achieving bilingualism in children even when you want them to be bilingual. Counter to what the English-only, English-first, or English-as-official-language believers say, it’s incredibly difficult to get a child to speak fluently in any language but those that dominate a society—so laws, campaigns, and cuts in bilingual education aren’t necessary.

Homes is where the native languages are. Roger Pulvers writes about what it took to get his children fluent in English even though they were living in Japan. “Frequent visits to the country of the parent who is not living in their own country are necessary. These should really be annual visits of up to a month, if possible. My wife and I, neither of us Japanese, did this over the years when we were living in Japan. We were putting our children through the Japanese school system; and even though we are both native speakers of English, our children’s command of the language was far from standard. Their better language, by far, was that of their outside world, namely, Japanese.”

Hispanic parents are frustrated because children won’t learn Spanish. Tal Abbady writes that even in Florida, where about 20 percent of Floridians speak a variety of Spanish at home, only 22 percent of third-generation immigrants speak even conversational Spanish, and then often without proper schooling in Spanish diction, language, grammar and verb conjugation. “As they enter adulthood in a Spanish-rich state, some second-generation Hispanics regret their English-only upbringing. ‘I should have learned the language at the time,’ said Alper, who says he’d have more opportunities at work if he spoke Spanish. As an adult, he’s asked his mother to start speaking to him in Spanish. ‘Now he makes me feel guilty,’ said Linda Alper, Jonathan Alper’s mother, also of Pembroke Pines. ‘He asks me “How come my cousins speak Spanish and I don’t?”’”