Newsletter | Dictionary Society of North America

Conferences Spring 2021

February 2, 2021February 28, 2021 by David Jost Comment Closed

About the Conference The Dictionary Society of North America has held biennial meetings since 1977. Bringing together scholars of lexicography and professional lexicographers, the conference is an important event for anyone interested in modern dictionary research and practices. Speakers must be DSNA members; nonmembers should apply for membership when they receive their acceptance to speak. Join here. DSNA 23: Now Online The DSNA is pleased to announce that our 23rd biennial meeting will be virtual to accommodate the travel difficulties the pandemic has wrought. You’ll find the conference announcement below; we will update this page with the links to the call for papers and the registration as the conference committee publishes them. DSNA 23: Fitness of Our Dictionaries and Lexicography to 21st-Century Realities Held virtually on June 4, 202110:00 am – 3:30 pm North American Eastern Time(GMT 15:00 – 20:30) PROGRAM Introduction: Steve Kleinedler (Past 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...

Member News Spring 2021

February 2, 2021February 28, 2021 by David Jost Comment Closed

Lynne Murphy has just started work as the editor of Dictionaries. (See her article elsewhere in this issue on what this means to her.) She will welcome any submissions, inquiries, or suggestions regarding the journal; email lynnem@sussex.ac.uk. Kory Stamper plays a prominent role in Netflix's new series History of Swear Words. Each episode of the series, hosted by Nicholas Cage, features Stamper and other expert guests discussing a given profane or obscene word from linguistic, historic, psychological, and sociological perspectives, interspersed with segments in which well-known comedians riff on the use of those particular words in contemporary culture. Dictionary Day (October 16–-also Noah Webster’s birthday) was celebrated on our News page by the cover image for a book edited by Sarah Ogilvie. The book is dedicated to Madeline Kripke. The link below will take you to a Word file containing the table of contents: https://dictionarysociety.com/wp-content/uplo https://dictionarysociety.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/The-Cambridge-Companion-to-English-Dictionaries.docx Vince McCarren on his edition of the Medulla: "Up from the depths with news that I’ve just revised all of P, Q, and R...

Table of Contents Spring 2021

February 2, 2021February 28, 2021 by David Jost Comment Closed

Member News about Lynne Murphy. Kory Stamper, Sarah Ogilvie, Vincent McCarren, and job opportunities at Cambridge University Press Conferences: details of our 2021 remote conference and Lise Winer's list of other meetings DSNA: Wendalyn Nichols's Publication Committee report, news about our new forum and payment system, and Sarah Ogilvie's Globalex reports Journal Transition: greetings from Lynne Murphy and appreciation of Edward Finegan Collection of Rachel Fletcher, winner of the David Murray Book Collecting Prize Dictionaries: a new column by Janet DeCesaris Biography of John Morse by Peter Sokolowski Book Preservation by Michael Hancher Education: instruction in dictionaries by Anne Curzan History: a new column by Michael Adams State of Lexicography: Defining Moments by Orin Hargraves Quotations: Ships that Pass in the Night by Elizabeth Knowles Publication Information...

Publishing Information Fall 2020

August 6, 2020August 31, 2020 by David Jost Comment Closed

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...

Quotations Elizabeth Knowles Fall 2020

August 6, 2020August 31, 2020 by David Jost Comment Closed

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...

State of Lexicography Orin Hargraves Fall 2020

August 6, 2020August 31, 2020 by David Jost Comment Closed

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...

History Middle English Dictionary Staff Fall 2020

August 6, 2020August 31, 2020 by David Jost Comment Closed

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....

Education Fall 2020

August 6, 2020August 31, 2020 by David Jost Comment Closed

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

August 6, 2020August 31, 2020 by David Jost Comment Closed

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,...

Collection David Vancil Fall 2020

August 5, 2020August 31, 2020 by David Jost Comment Closed

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...