Category: Newsletter

Ships that Pass in the Night Elizabeth Knowles It is a common experience for a researcher, pursuing a particular line, to come across a tempting side path; one of the pleasures of retirement is that it is purely a personal choice as to whether or not you break off to pursue it. This happened to me recently, when I was looking for earlier general references to dictionaries of quotations. One of those I found was an item in the “Queries” column of New York Times of January 28, 1905 which immediately piqued my interest. The question turned on the origin of a book title. As the correspondent (a George Ashby of Yonkers) put it: “When Miss Harraden’s ‘Ships that Pass in the Night’ was published, it was said of a certain dictionary of quotations at the time that it was the only one that gave this phrase and its author’s name.” He wanted the answer to two questions. “Who was the author,...

Defining Moments Orin Hargraves I wrote my first definition for money in 1991. Here it is now 2021! Some things have changed, some have stayed the same during those 30 years. 1991-95: Paper Gives Way to Pixels My first paid lexicography gig was on the Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture. It was a first-edition learner’s dictionary, largely already written by British lexicographers. Four UK-resident Americans were recruited for the job, which was to add American content and Americanize the standing definitions enough so that the book could be marketed to learners of American English. None of us had or were expected to have a computer at home, and the internet was a novelty we’d barely heard of. Batches of work came to us in the mail, printed on A4 sheets. Along with each batch came a packet of paper-clipped index cards, which represented the cross-references to other entries in the dictionary from that batch. We edited the British definitions (adding American senses where...

The Hart Chart Michael Adams Histories of lexicography usually focus on influential dictionaries and those who made them. Rarely do we focus on historical users of dictionaries or the public reception of dictionaries. One can look at such things systematically, of course, coding mentions of dictionaries in the press, for instance, and characterizing reception on the basis of such data. One can also look at individual users and see how they figure in the history of lexicography but also, since users are citizens passing through social activity besides lexicography, how the use and reception of dictionaries resonates in larger historical and cultural domains. Laurance H. Hart was, as his obituary in The Central New Jersey Home News (November 28, 1964) observed, “one of [Metuchen, New Jersey’s] most colorful citizens.” With decades of further hindsight, that seems an understatement. A civil engineer with a degree from The Ohio State University, Hart had helped construct and maintain the New York State Barge Canal, but he...

Looking to Dictionaries for Questions as Much as Answers Anne Curzan University of Michigan Dictionaries have immense pedagogical power: They open up some of the most fundamental questions we as instructors often want to address about language authority, language change (semantic change as well as phonological), linguistic diversity, morphology, and the social valences and power of words. I have never had the opportunity to teach an entire course on dictionaries, but they feature prominently in the first few classes in both my introductory English linguistics course and my History of English course. Students express initial surprise to see dictionaries on the syllabus. What in the world could be interesting enough about dictionaries to merit multiple class days? But once we get started, the questions cascade over each other: How does a new word get into the dictionary? How often do words get taken out? Why isn’t my pronunciation of a word in the dictionary? How does one become a dictionary editor? What do you...

Michael Hancher has been hard at work on the preservation of books including dictionaries, as can be seen from his following text: https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:33963/ There's a link there to the MLA session description (which included remarks by Lisa Berglund, about the distinctive features of annotated dictionaries): https://mla.confex.com/mla/2021/meetingapp.cgi/Session/8967 The prospectus for the session is here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/121xheSfF63MuZYnxQRQMp_QNzB3ahbRE/view William Frederick Poole, sometime president of the American Library Association and the American Historical Association, was librarian of the Newberry Library in Chicago when he inveighed in 1893 against a new vogue to discard old books from libraries, citing neglected dictionaries as an example: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112051214614&view=1up&seq=34&q1=dictionaries I document that vogue (the so-called "Quincy plan" -- which actually makes sense for community libraries, though not research libraries), though not this particular passage, on pp. 13-18 of the bibliography. Dictionaries have not been much singled out in the age-old debate about the necessity and hazards of weeding books, but they are liable to the same fate as old encyclopedias and textbooks. "Dr. Winsor" (Justin Winsor, Harvard's librarian)...

John Morse (Photo Credit: Merriam-Webster) The hush of a dictionary company’s editorial department was likely familiar and comforting when John Morse arrived in Springfield, Massachusetts forty years ago: he is the son of two librarians and the brother of a third. Long careers in lexicography come from a combination of predilection, preparation, and plain old luck, and John’s bookish childhood and degrees in English from Haverford College (B.A., ‘73) and the University of Chicago (M.A., ‘77) set the groundwork for an editorial career at Merriam-Webster. He was still a graduate student when he began working for Encyclopaedia Britannica, the parent company of Merriam-Webster. His first assignment was an English major’s dream and the kind of idiosyncratic project that fortuitously prepared him for a career in lexicography. Britannica’s goal for The Microbook Library of English Literature was to provide the text of every notable work from the origins of literary production through the early 20th century, up to the point at which copyright...

Dictionaries Janet DeCesaris As I begin the first installment of what I hope to be many for the DSNA Newsletter, I would like to thank the Newsletter’s editor, David Jost, for giving me this opportunity to write about dictionary-related topics in a more personal fashion than that usually afforded by academic presentations. In this and the columns to follow, I hope to comment on features about dictionaries that I have found to be particularly interesting over the years, as well as provide interviews with people who have worked in our field. I have met many of the Newsletter’s readers at DSNA meetings, which I started attending in 2003, and for those of you who do not know me this is probably what you need to know: I am originally from the Washington, D.C. area and studied linguistics and Spanish at Georgetown University and then at Indiana University; I taught Spanish at Rutgers University before moving to Barcelona, Spain in 1987; and, I have...

Collecting Dictionaries Rachel Fletcher Image credits: Rachel Fletcher unless otherwise noted It’s a great honour to be asked by David Vancil to contribute to the newsletter a short piece on my collection of dictionaries. I have never considered myself a serious collector, and it was mostly on a whim that I decided to submit my collection to the University of Glasgow Library’s David Murray Book Collecting Prize at the beginning of 2020. So I was a little startled, as well as excited, to find out that I had been selected as one of two joint winners of the 2020 prize. My BA was at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where I started off in the department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic before moving to linguistics. I found my dictionaries niche as a postgraduate student; I moved to the University of Glasgow to do an MPhil by research on the first published dictionary of Old English (William Somner’s 1659 Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum) and stayed for a PhD on...

A note from the editor of Dictionaries Lynne Murphy In 2021, I mark the 30th anniversary of my first academic publication. It feels slightly unreal that in the same year I take on the editorship of the journal that published it, Dictionaries. 30 years? I guess I'm one of the grown-ups now. I'm honored to have been nominated and chosen to serve the society that has served me so kindly. I'm very lucky to be following Ed Finegan in the position. Ed's hard work and insight brought the journal into a new era of semiannual issues, new features, and electronic access on Project Muse. While Ed has set the bar high for his successor, he's also put a lot of the hard work behind us. I'm grateful for his generous mentorship so far and for his continued advocacy for the journal in his role as DSNA President. It's a real treat to start working with associate editor Sarah Ogilvie and reviews editor Traci...

Membership of the DSNA Publications Committee Wendalyn Nichols The remit of the publications committee of the Dictionary Society of North America is to act collectively as the publisher of the Society’s journal, newsletter, and website. On the content side, this includes supporting the editors in the process of acquisition of articles and reviews for publication – recommending contributors and works for review, facilitating the peer review of submissions, and acting as a sounding board. On the business side, it still includes supporting the journal’s print publication, negotiating with the printer as necessary and overseeing redesigns, but the attention of the members is increasingly on our digital future: of the newsletter on the Society’s website, and of the journal via Project Muse – especially as we strive to meet the requirements for more prestigious indexing and for Open Access. The standing members of the committee are: ChairExecutive Secretary of the SocietyEditor of Dictionaries, the journal of the SocietyReviews editor and any other associate editors of...