Category: Newsletter

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

A Life in Lexicography A colleague of mine, when we were about to advertise a dictionary post, opined that we should regard with some reserve any applicant who declared that they had always wanted to be a lexicographer, since this was not a natural thing to want to be. While I think this might be rather a severe judgement, it does in my experience hold one grain of truth: many people I have known (and I am among them) have come into lexicography sideways. We did not set out with that intention—but, having discovered it, it turned out to be something, at least in my case, that felt a perfect fit with what I wanted to do. Looking back now I can see that, almost accidentally, I made choices which brought me into the world of dictionaries. I chose to read English at the University of Exeter, which at the time was offering a very traditional curriculum. Everyone had a year of...

Dictionary Society of North America President’s Report, 2019–21 In preparation for writing this, I have been struck again by what extraordinary changes the last two years have seen. I would like to use this report to review what seem to me to have been key points, as well as taking the opportunity to express my thanks for some of the skilled support so generously given. It does of course represent a personal view, and inevitably there will be other things I could have mentioned, but I hope you will be generous to any sins of omission committed in the interests of keeping extent within reasonable grounds (which any lexicographer feels bound to do). There are of course some things which have been a constant, above all the support and wisdom offered by DSNA colleagues. I have been reminded anew of just how much in the last two years I have relied on the skill and experience of Ed Finegan, our Vice-President and President...

DSNA 23: Fitness of Our Dictionaries and Lexicography to 21st-Century Realities Held virtually on June 4, 202110:00 am – 3:30pm North American Eastern Time(GMT 15:00 – 20:30) PROGRAM (UPDATED 6/1/21) Introduction: Michael Adams (former President, DSNA) Keynote:  Dictionaries as Authorities: Can They Be and Should They? Kory Stamper and Bryan GarnerModerator: Lane Greene (The Economist) Panels 1. How global and national events affect modern lexicographyModerator: Ben Zimmer (Wall Street Journal)Online dictionaries are able to adapt speedily to rapid changes in vocabulary and usage. As an example, Covid-19 and the pandemic have spawned a range of new words and new applications for existing words, such as contact tracing, community spread, flatten the curve, PPE, social distancing, and Covid-19 itself. Who monitors these and similar developments for dictionaries? Who writes or revises the definitions? How do lexicographers keep up with global and national changes in vocabulary and word meanings? How does the proliferation of new vocabulary affect established lexicographical approaches? Stefan Fatsis: “34 Days: Inside Merriam-Webster’s Emergency Coronavirus Update”Wendalyn Nichols and Lewis C. Lawyer: “Identifying Emergent Meanings...