Category: Newsletter

The DSNA Newsletter is usually published twice a year, in the spring and fall. The editor is David Jost. Associate Editor is Peter Chipman. Member news items can be sent to dsna.membernews@gmail.com. Other Newsletter correspondence, such as articles for publication, should be directed to the editor at dajebj@gmail.com. Send correspondence re membership, etc. to Kory Stamper, Executive Secretary, DSNAPO Box 537Collingswood, NJ 08108-0537 This issue:  Vol. 44 No. 2 (2020) Cumulative issue #90 ...

Angel of the Pestilence Elizabeth Knowles, April 2020 In the last week of January 2020, when I was exploring possible walks in the vicinity of the market town of Wantage, I noticed an unusual commemorative inscription on the (exterior) north wall of the chancel of the parish church of St Michael’s Wantage. (I had no idea, of course, that a couple of months later we would be one of many countries grappling with a twenty-first century version of a “pestilence.”) The inscription reads: “Between this Wall and the pathway were interred from Sept: 29th to Oct: 15th 1832 the bodies of sixteen persons, who with three others of this Town had died of the Asiatic Cholera, the ravages of which disease were mercifully terminated by Him, who alone could say to the Angel of the Pestilence—‘It is enough, stay now thine hand.’”  As the diligent editor of a dictionary of quotations, I immediately wondered about the source of the quotation, and how...

The World English Dictionary that the World Didn’t Need Orin Hargraves Twenty years ago, the Society’s journal Dictionaries (No. 21) published a long and detailed review of the Encarta World English Dictionary (EWED) by Sidney Landau: a DSNA fellow, former Society president, and perhaps the most highly respected name in American lexicography for his widely read Dictionaries: the Art and Craft of Lexicography. In his 13-page review, Sidney takes apart and discards nearly every promotional claim made for the dictionary and then analyzes it carefully in comparison to its market peers, finding it wanting in nearly every respect. I was one of the “more than 250 lexicographers from 10 countries” (a promotional claim) that worked on EWED over the three or so years when it went from flawed vision to published book. Now, 20 years after the fact, is a good time to reflect on EWED’s stunted career. When it was published, EWED was put forward as “a publishing event that will set...

The Staff of the Middle English Dictionary: 1952 to completion David Jost “Those since 1952 are listed in the headnotes and endnotes to the individual published letters.” “Those” refers to the editors and production staff of the Middle English Dictionary. The quotation is from page iv of the Middle English Dictionary, Plan and Bibliography, Second Edition, by Robert E. Lewis, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2007. The purpose of this brief article is to use these headnotes and endnotes as well as fascicle covers to list the staff since 1952. I use these sources exclusively, so I do not capture such things as facts or name changes that occurred after these sources were published. To do justice to the staff lists it would not do to simply list staff alphabetically. The list needs to be broken down into four periods to give a sense of how the work was done. These periods are: 1. Hans Kurath, 2. Sherman M. Kuhn a., 3....

Using Dictionaries for Sociolinguistic Inquiry in the College Classroom Katie Welch katie@welcheducation.com University of North Texas at Dallas In the 2014 TED Talk “What makes a word ‘real’?” Anne Curzan mentions that she requires that students teach her two new slang words each time her class meets, a practice that is often employed by U.S.-based linguistics professors eager to keep up with trends in American English. A few semesters later, having adopted this practice while teaching a course titled Language of Now, I stood before a group of first year college students who had enrolled in the course as a means of completing a core curriculum requirement and asked them to share some slang words with me. On that particular day, one word that stood out to me was boojie [buʒi]. As was the case with most of the words shared, I was not familiar with this term. When I probed further, the student explained that she used it to mean ‘uppity’ or ‘acting fancier...

MADELINE KRIPKE 1943-2020 From Collection of Madeline Kripke. Reuse prohibited. Madeline Kripke, who died aged 76 on April 25, 2020, yet another of New York’s many victims of Covid-19, was for the bulk of her life the world’s leading, if not unique collector of lexicographical material, both historical and contemporary. This was especially the case as regarded her unrivalled library of slang dictionaries and allied ‘counter-linguistic’ material, which had set her career in motion more than forty years ago. The classic poacher-turned-gamekeeper, she moved from a fascination with dictionaries, first encountered as source of delight when very young, to establishing herself as a dealer in their finest or most recondite examples, with a focus on the less respected, but by extension less easily available slang lexis, and finally, falling in love with her stock as must be a temptation for every variety of dealer, to become a  collector pure and simple. If one might rewrite the alleged ‘whore’s excuse’, in collecting terms,...

Collecting Column for the Newsletter David Vancil Linda Mitchell was planning to write another piece in this issue on a wordbook-rich collection she has made use of, but having to prepare online classes for fall classes (she teaches at San Jose State University) is taking up her time and energy. With the loss of Madeline Kripke, we are experiencing not only a sadness at her death but the uncertainty of knowing what will happen to the physical manifestation of legacy—her thousands of dictionaries and other works of interest to DSNA members. What will happen to her wonderful books? She had considered for many years what should be done with them. But she was brought down by COVID-19 without having made any concrete plans, as far is known. Let’s hope for the best. I recall in conversations with Tom Rodgers, who focused on books lacking in the Cordell Collection, that he was contemplating donating his collection to a university, in particular Emory University. Tom was...

Three items concerning major North American Dictionary Projects: The online Middle English Dictionary remains an active project under the custodianship of the University of Michigan Library, where, however, it has to compete for time and attention with other text and software-development projects, including the enlargement of EEBO-TCP (Early English Books Online). Its helpline (mec-info@umich.edu) is monitored, its platform remains in development (with date-sorting next on the to-do list), a small team of editors continues to add and correct the text almost daily, and re-loads of the online data should be expected on a roughly annual basis.  Compared with the original e-MED, the present revival effort, now entering its fourth year, has added about 1,600 bibliographic 'stencils,' 2,500 dictionary entries, and 16,000 quotations.Though the project has a dauntingly long list of improvements to work on, it is concentrating this year (2020) on six areas: (1) examining and entering information from the last 1,000 or so 'Supplement slips' (produced by editors of the...

From the President In my April message to DSNA friends and colleagues, I referred to the strange times we were in. At that point, Britain like other countries had just gone into lockdown; now as we all experiment with some form of emergence, the times hardly seem less strange. However, it does seem important to say that it has been and remains a key concern of the Board that work for DSNA continues on track. Since I last wrote, the current issue of our excellent Journal has appeared on schedule, and I am compiling this to meet the July deadline for our Newsletter.  Plans for our biennial in Colorado, June 2021, continue. I want now to update you on one particular aspect of what we have been doing as a Board, as regards strategic planning. The Board is taking time to reflect on our core values, and consider how best the Society’s vision may be delivered in a rapidly changing world. What...