Newsletter | Dictionary Society of North America

Newsletter Spring 2023

April 17, 2023April 24, 2023 by DSNA Office Comment Closed

Newsletter Spring 2023 Table of Contents Member News Conference Update (Orin Hargraves) CFP: Dictionaries Special Issue on Indigenous Lexicography Column: Quotations (Elizabeth Knowles) In Memoriam Gerard Morris Gifts to the DSNA (Ed Finegan) News from the DSNA Office (Lindsay Rose Russell) Upcoming Conferences Publication Information Member News What have you been up to? The DSNA loves to share news of member projects, publications, programs, and more! Please send your news to dsna.membernews@gmail.com for inclusion; deadline for submissions for the Fall 2023 issue is Friday 25 August 2023. You can also see and share what’s happening on DSNA’s Member Forum, Facebook, and Twitter. David Vancil has published a collection of poetry, Expiation: War and Its Discontents (Kelsay Books, 2022). It’s available for purchase on Amazon.com and on the publisher’s website. Dabney A. Bankert's book, Philology in Turbulent Times: Joseph Bosworth, His Dictionary, and the Recovery of Old English has been published as part of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies series Publications of the Dictionary of Old English. Bankert's detailed analysis of the creation of Joseph Bosworth and...

Newsletter Fall 2022

November 2, 2022April 17, 2023 by DSNA Office Comment Closed

Newsletter Fall 2022 Table of Contents Member & Dictionary News In Memoriam: Jeremiah P. Farrell In Memoriam: E. Ward Gilman by John Morse In Memoriam: Vincent McCarren by David Jost Upcoming Conferences Publication Information Member & Dictionary News After being announced in Dictionaries 42.1 in 2021, Charlotte Brewer and Stephen Turton’s pilot digital edition of the correspondence of James A. H. Murray, the first chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, went live at www.murrayscriptorium.org in July 2022. *********** The University of Minnesota Press announces Anatoly Liberman’s Take My Word for It: A Dictionary of English Idioms (Pub date: February 28, 2023): As author Anatoly Liberman so rightly notes, language is the most mysterious tool we use. Yet while language allows us to express thoughts, the way people use language is not always clear. To pay through the nose. Raining cats and dogs. By hook or by crook. Curry favor. Drink like a fish. Eat crow. We hear such phrases every day, but this book is the first truly all-encompassing etymological guide...

Publication Information Fall 2021

August 15, 2021August 31, 2021 by David Jost Comment Closed

PUBLICATION INFORMATION SPRING 2021 The DSNA Newsletter is usually published twice a year, in the spring and fall. Editor is David Jost. Associate Editor is Peter Chipman. Member news items can be sent for the moment to dsna.membernews@gmail.com. Other Newsletter correspondence, such as articles for publication, should be directed to the editor at dajebj@gmail.com but new addresses will be announced when available. Our Executive Director is Lindsay Rose Russell. Send correspondence re membership, etc. to Dictionary Society of North AmericaDepartment of English, University of Illinois608 S Wright St, Rm 208Urbana IL 61801USA This issue: Vol. 45 No. 2 (2021) Cumulative issue #92 ...

Quotations Elizabeth Knowles Fall 2021

August 12, 2021August 31, 2021 by David Jost Comment Closed

A Nest of Singing Birds One of the pleasurable things about working with quotations is their capacity to surprise. Even a quotation which you know quite well, but have never had great reason to think about, may on investigation reveal an unexpected usage history. Recently, I came across just such an example, in a heading in the London Times: “Pit of vipers or a nest of singing birds: behind the scenes at No 10.” The heading introduced a piece on alleged factionalism in Number Ten Downing Street, with the Prime Minister’s Press Secretary, Allegra Stratton, claiming that contrary to reports “We are all a nest of singing birds.” I was familiar with the phrase quoted as a coinage of Samuel Johnson’s, recorded by Boswell in his Life of Johnson, but it occurred to me that I would not necessarily today have expected to find it in live use as a quotation today. When I looked the original up to refresh my memory...

State of Lexicography by Orin Hargraves Fall 2021

August 11, 2021August 31, 2021 by David Jost Comment Closed

A Haiku Dictionary? My recent columns for the newsletter have been retrospective. This one, as I indicated in my conference presentation, is prospective. I hope it will spark some interest among readers and I will be especially grateful for feedback and engagement with the project. When I bought the domain HaikuDictionary.com a few years ago, it was a baby step towards bringing to life an idea that had been floating through my mind long before: a dictionary in which the “definitions” are all in the form of haikus. What would be the point of such an undertaking? To summarize in one word, fun. I also think it would have some practical uses, which I’ll talk about a bit below. The motivation arose like this: after you have defined a word for native speaker dictionaries, a children’s dictionary, ESL dictionaries, and you’ve suppled the gloss for it in a couple of bilingual dictionaries, is there anything left to do? Is there any challenge? Can...

History Michael Adams Fall 2021

August 10, 2021September 1, 2021 by David Jost Comment Closed

Commercially motivated dictionaries and brand communities Michael Adams Histories of lexicography suffer from assumptions about which dictionaries deserve our attention and how to value them. We tend to write about big dictionaries that supposedly represent national identities (Le Robert, the academy dictionaries, the OED, Webster’s Third). Most of all, since Samuel Johnson or so, we have celebrated professional lexicographers and their professional products. Such dictionaries are well worth our attention, of course, but we focus on them so much that we overlook dictionaries and glossaries of mundane origins and made for less exclusively lexicographical purposes (but see Nagy 2004). The historians (who often are or have been lexicographers) privilege dictionaries good for nothing else but word research (or door-stopping or booster-seating), whereas dictionaries can serve interests beyond words. Authors and audiences of such dictionaries know it, which may explain why there are so many dictionaries we never write about. One overlooked sub-genre is the bespoke marketing dictionary, compiled to promote interest in...

Dictionaries Janet DeCesaris Fall 2021

August 9, 2021August 30, 2021 by David Jost Comment Closed

Pronunciation in General Language Dictionaries Janet DeCesaris Pronunciation in general language dictionaries is an interesting topic. Today, people looking up words on electronic devices are able to hear a standard pronunciation of a word by clicking on an icon. My guess is that most people on devices that reproduce audio pay little attention to the written representation of pronunciation in dictionaries of English, which may use the International Phonetic Alphabet or some system of respelling. This is a far cry from earlier periods, when printed dictionaries contained extensive guides to pronunciation in the front matter. To cite just one example that everyone can consult freely on Internet Archive, the 1910 edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language based on the International dictionary of 1890 and 1900 published by G. & C. Merriam (now Merriam-Webster) has an extensive (and very interesting in my opinion) Guide to Pronunciation that runs 39 pages long, including the 15 pages devoted to the ‘Synopsis...

Collection David Vancil Fall 2021

August 8, 2021August 31, 2021 by David Jost Comment Closed

Those Fascinating Exhibits Part of the bread and butter of a rare books, or a special collection, operation is exhibits to raise interest in holdings, support a particular event, or facilitate ongoing research. Nowadays, these may be actual exhibits or virtual ones. In fact, an individual with access to the Internet may visit various collections online and create in some cases a virtual exhibit of holdings on the fly. A favorite online haunt of mine has been The Internet Archive, where, for instance, I searched recently on Ambrogio Calepino and created a selection of digitized dictionaries held by libraries hither and yon. For most of these works, I was able to view and page through images of the contents. I recommend checking out this resource at http://archive.org for similar searches; it’s fun and may turn up something unexpected. This is a partial screen capture of a search on “Ambrogio Calepino” on The Internet Archive. Try some other searches to see what you...

Farewell David Jost

August 8, 2021August 31, 2021 by David Jost Comment Closed

This will be my last issue of the DSNA Newsletter. It has truly been an honor and a privilege to follow in the footsteps of my predecessors beginning with Edward Gates. My sincerest gratitude goes to all those who made it possible for me to do this work. I want to single out a few who did special work for the Newsletter. First and foremost is Peter Chipman who edited all the online issues. Steve Kleinedler gave me his services while Peter worked at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Peter continued his work after he went to MIT. David Vancil contributed many times with articles on collecting and also recruited others to write on the subject. Lise Winer regularly gave us lists of conferences that were relevant to our field. Several people have agreed to write regular columns for the Newsletter. In alphabetical order they are Michael Adams, Janet DeCesaris, Connie Eble, Orin Hargraves, and Elizabeth Knowles. Almost all of them have...

In Memoriam

August 7, 2021August 30, 2021 by David Jost Comment Closed

A number of those in our field have died recently. Thus this Newsletter has a special In Memoriam section. The remembrances are given in alphabetical order. “Canada’s Word Lady”: Katherine Barber (1959-2021) By Stefan Dollinger On 24 April 2021, Katherine Patricia Mary Barber, grand dame of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, passed away in Toronto at the hand of a particularly aggressive form of brain cancer. She was 61. Katherine leaves behind a profound legacy of reference works of Canadian English, big and small, and two well-made general-interest books on Canadian English. While her flagship reference work has not been maintained since 2008 [last ed. 2004] – in what I call an industry-wide problem below –, her Twitter account, @thewordlady, as well as her blog, katherinebarber.blogspot.com, act as her public record since then, which will be valuable for historians of Canadian intellectual life. I met Katherine – Canada’s Word Lady, as she was stylized in the media – for the first time in 2007. She...