The Lexicographer's Rules

Joan Hall, editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English, forwarded this link to the email list of the Dictionary Society of North America: The Gifted in Pursuit of the Valued from Americana Exchange.

It’s a long, contemplative story (including an audio interview) about Madeleine Kripke, a New York City rare book dealer and antiquarian who specializes in dictionaries. Her collection is staggering: more than 20,000 items. Few libraries have anything like it, not only because of her particular taste and knowledge of the works she collects, but because her works are often for sale to lexicographers and, better, she often will loan them to lexicographers who are doing lexical work or research, as you can see in Simon Winchester’s The Meaning of Everything, a book about the Oxford English Dictionary, where he writes that she “kindly copied many rare papers and documents from her immense collection of dictionaryalia, and offered much sage advice.”

I know Madeline through the Dictionary Society of North America. This year at our biennial meeting in Chicago there was a silent auction for a number of reference works that had belonged to the now defunct dictionary department of the publisher Scott Foresman, now Pearson Scott Foresman, which graciously donated them for the benefit of the Society. Madeleine beat me out on a complete bound set of the Middle English Dictionary at $300, but I’m happy to say that I did score an entire set of the Scottish National Dictionary (available online as part of the Dictionary of the Scots Language) for a very reasonable $75.

In any case, do read the article. The descriptions, written by Madeleine herself, of her rare and interesting works are tantalizing.

At one point on that trip to Germany, Opal awoke from napping in her mother’s arms to find Elizabeth negotiating with a desk clerk in German. Opal shrieked, demanded to be let down, and ran to the door, trying to get out of the pension.  Elizabeth asked what was going on, and Opal explained that she had to go outside to find her momma and daddy. Apparently, she thought (for a little while, anyway) that Elizabeth had been replaced by a German-speaking impostor.

One of the more interesting aspects of the new Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is that the editorial team, lead by Angus Stevenson, (not Jesse Sheidlower, as mistakenly reported by the American Spectator; Jesse is only doing publicity for the new edition) chose to remove the hyphens from many words. BBC has a fairly decent story about it, and gives these changes:

Became two unhyphenated words
Fig leaf
Hobby horse
Ice cream
Pin money
Pot belly
Test tube

Became one word
Bumblebee
Chickpea
Crybaby
Leapfrog
Logjam

I should also add that if cost is not an object, the Shorter is the dictionary I recommend as a reliable dictionary for household, office, or school use. It does tend to skew a bit British, but with the latest edition, I gather that much more attention has been paid to making sure that North American terms, meanings, and pronunciations are included.

If you’re more price-conscious, I now recommend Webster’s New World College. This is a change over past recommendations.

If you insist on a free dictionary, then I recommend OneLook, where you’ll find several reliable dictionaries indexed and searchable from a single interface (including my Double-Tongued Dictionary).

Found on Boing Boing, Brian Dettmer carves up reference works so that the flat images on interior pages take on shape and form.

Dennis Baron explains that in cases of “foreign accent syndrome,” in which someone receives a head injury and then begins speaking differently, they’re not really taking on a specific, pre-existing accent of a different language or social group. Foreign accent syndrome only affects the sound of someone’s speech, not their syntax or vocabulary. What’s really happening is that non-specialist observers—that is, people who are not linguists or dialectologists—incorrectly ascribe the victim’s new speech patterns to new expertise in recognizable dialect rather than correctly ascribing it to brain damage.

Dennis writes, “Damage to the left hemisphere of the brain, the one which controls speech, affects their ability to articulate sounds, and listeners characterize this difference, which is actually a disability, not a new linguistic power, by equating it with some accent they’ve heard. The British woman who began to sound Jamaican to one of her relatives sounded French Canadian or Swedish to others.”

Some stories about it:

Boy recovering from brain op emerges with new accent. Supposedly the boy now sounds “posh,” which is a British way of saying he sounds like he’s eddicated and moneyfied.

Bike crash Czech speaks English. A Czech worker is said to sound more English.

Stroke gives woman British accent. I heard this American woman on a BBC interview. She was vaguely British, but she’d also clearly spent time adding Briticisms to her vocabulary in order to make the most of her new-found fame.

Foreign Accent syndrome baffles medical experts. A woman in Missouri is said to sound French.

Geordie stroke victim now ‘speaks like Jamaican’.