Conferences Fall 2020

by David Jost Comment Closed
2021 Conference Postponed With great regret, but having carefully considered the circumstances relating to the COVID pandemic, the Executive Board of DSNA has agreed to postpone the planned in-person 2021 biennial meeting. The Board has an unwavering commitment to holding an in-person meeting, with the focus already publicized, at a later date to be announced as soon as possible. We are also exploring the feasibility of holding an exciting one-day virtual meeting in June of 2021. More details will follow, but it seemed right to convey the key information without delay. Elizabeth KnowlesPresident, DSNA DSNA XXIII in Boulder Orin Hargraves The 2021 DSNA conference will be held at the University of Colorado, Boulder, or CU as the locals call it. Many of you know that I have worked there for the last several years in various capacities, none of which credentials me to host a conference at the institution. Happily, a colleague has agreed to be our faculty sponsor. So firstly, hats off to Laura Michaelis-Cummings,...
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Member News Fall 2020

by David Jost Comment Closed
Kory Stamper was recently part of the solution to a NYT acrostic. And the quotation is about lexicographers. See more at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/08/crosswords/variety-acrostic.html From Sarah Ogilvie we hear about the new book, The Whole World in a Book: Dictionaries in the Nineteenth Century (OUP, 2020) edited by Sarah Ogilvie & Gabriella Safran. It looks at the creation of dictionaries globally in the nineteenth century and includes essays on languages as diverse as Manchu Chinese, Russian, Libras (Brazilian sign language), and Persian (to name but a few) by scholars including Michael Adams, John Considine, Anne Dykstra, Ed Finegan, Volker Harm, Sarah Ogilvie, Susan Rennie, Lindsay Rose Russell, Gabriella Safran, Peter Sokolowski, and Ilya Vinitsky. From David Barnhart: Barnhart’s Never-finished Political Dictionary of the 21st Century—Second Edition (c. 2019) is now available from the publisher: Lexik House Publishers, P.O. Box 2018, Hyde Park, N.Y. 12538 This edition is substantially enlarged from the original publication (698 + viii pp).  It is composed of 3,500+ entries, over 5,000 quotations, and 50 articles devoted...
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Table of Contents Fall 2020

by David Jost Comment Closed
1. To make it easier to navigate the Newsletter the introduction will now contain a TOC to the various posts of the Newsletter. 2. Member News: Peter Chipman offers news that has been gathered about our members. 3. Conferences: Orin Hargraves announces the DSNA’s next conference and a Call for Papers, and Lise Winer lists conferences of interest. 4. DSNA: Elizabeth Knowles, our president, addresses our Society and Ed Finegan reports on Globalex. He also brings an interesting puzzle to our attention from a past issue of our Journal. 5. Dictionaries: We offer material on three major North American dictionary projects, the MED, DARE, and DOE. 6. Collections: David Vancil discusses the Library of Congress. 7. Madeline Kripke is memorialized by Jonathon Green, Michael Adams, and David Vancil. 8. Education: Katie Welch tells us how she uses dictionaries in the college classroom for sociolinguistic inquiry. 9. History: David Jost offers a history of the staff of the Middle English Dictionary. 10. State of Lexicography: Orin Hargraves tells us about...
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Conferences Spring 2020

by David Jost Comment Closed
DSNA XXIII in Boulder Orin Hargraves The 2021 DSNA conference will be held at the University of Colorado, Boulder, or CU as the locals call it. Many of you know that I have worked there for the last several years in various capacities, none of which credentials me to host a conference at the institution. Happily, a colleague has agreed to be our faculty sponsor. So firstly, hats off to Laura Michaelis-Cummings, who is currently Chair of Linguistics at CU, a former student of Charles Fillmore at Berkeley where she did her PhD, and also the editor of the CUP journal Language and Cognition. CU Boulder is the largest research university in Colorado with a total enrollment over 30,000. Boulder is located in northern Colorado, less than an hour from the capital Denver, and well served by public transportation links. Renowned for its location at the foot of the majestic Rocky Mountains, Boulder is also home to the only Chautauqua still in operation west of the Mississippi. It is the closest metropolitan area to Rocky Mountain National Park,...
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Publishing Information Spring 2020

by David Jost Comment Closed
The DSNA Newsletter is usually published twice a year, in the spring, March 1, and fall, September 1. 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, DSNA PO Box 537 Collingswood, NJ 08108-0537 This issue:  Vol. 44 No. 1 (2020) Cumulative issue #89 ...
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Quotations: Elizabeth Knowles Spring 2020

by David Jost Comment Closed
“Sleepe after Toyle” Elizabeth Knowles Lexicographers are never quite off duty. Even when pursuing some completely different avocation, you may be struck by a word, phrase, or (especially in my case) quotation, whose usage provokes enquiry. My most recent experience of this came when I was walking in South Oxfordshire, exploring the footpaths between the town of Wallingford and the village of Cholsey—my particular object being to visit the church of St Mary’s, Cholsey. Both Wallingford and Cholsey were originally in the county of Berkshire, and Nikolaus Pevsner’s Berkshire volume (1966) in his ‘Buildings of England’ series describes St Mary’s Cholsey as “Quite a major church. Cruciform, of flint and stone, and essentially Norman, with a chancel lengthened in the C13 [thirteenth century].” As well as its many intrinsic interests as a building, the churchyard surrounding it is also where the crime writer Agatha Christie is buried (she and her second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, lived at Winterbrook House on the outskirts of Wallingford). I went over to look at the very handsome headstone that commemorates...
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State of Lexicography: Orin Hargraves Spring 2020

by David Jost Comment Closed
Lexicographers’ Aid Orin Hargraves My prompt, from editor David Jost, is to write about how I assist other lexicographers. That’s a question that would probably be more accurately answered by those lexicographers, but I’ll take a stab at it, in the hope that my perception of the activity is roughly the same as theirs. Leaving aside lexicographers I have taught or trained in a formal setting, it’s fair to say that my assistance to lexicographers (sometimes lexicographer-wannabes) has been random, unpredictable, equally educational and helpful for me, and almost never played out in person, thanks to the reach of the internet. The majority of folks I’ve helped out were “cold callers” —people who have contacted me out of the blue, having found me online or by referral. My interactions with them range from a single email exchange to years-long, lucrative contracts. The common theme has been their perception that I might know something of use to them, and my willingness—in all cases—to share what I...
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History: Vincent P. McCarren and Eugene Green Spring 2020

by David Jost Comment Closed
The Medulla This edition of the Stonyhurst manuscript of the Medulla Grammatice is an attempt at revealing a current of thinking, indeed, a first step in the direction of understanding a sub-literary movement which took place within England from beginning to end of the fifteenth century. This edition represents the earliest Latin-English glossary in the tradition entitled the Medulla Grammatice or Marrow of Grammar (Philology) ante 1425 A.D. The Medulla Grammatice comprises nineteen known manuscripts and four fragments. For a detailed description of the manuscripts of the Medulla Grammatice the reader should see appendix II of V.P. McCarren’s critical edition of the Bristol MS. DM1 in Traditio, 48, 1993, pp. 220-24. Entries are in Latin with glosses or interpretations in Middle English. Not infrequently transliterated Greek appears with Latin and/or Middle English as glosses. At times Hebrew and French make their appearance. The interchange of these languages in this work reflects the culmination of a linguistic tradition that dates from the early centuries A.D., i.e., Jerome, the...
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Education: Connie Eble Spring 2020

by David Jost Comment Closed
 KIDS AND A DICTIONARY: AN OCCASIONAL ESSAY Connie Eble This is an occasional essay, that old-fashioned genre written for or about an occasion.  What prompted it was my giving several children copies of The Dictionary of Difficult Words, compiled and written by lexicographer and fellow-DSNA member Jane Solomon and illustrated by Louise Lockhart  (Frances Lincoln Children’s Books, 2019).  I love this beautifully crafted word book, as did every grownup I showed it to, and I was eager to know if the children to whom I gave it would find it as engaging.  Because this was not conceived as a research project, no attempt was made to control for such factors as gender, race, or socio-economic status.  The children are white and are growing up in two-parent homes in which their parents are college graduates and actively support the education of their children. Several weeks after I distributed the books, I arranged to interview three of the youngsters individually.  Dylan, age ten, lives...
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Collection: Linda C. Mitchell Spring 2020

by David Jost Comment Closed
The BL: A Scholar’s Paradise Found Linda C. Mitchell On January 3, 2020, I posted the following on Facebook: “Happy to be back at the British Library. Desk #300 was waiting for me like an old friend.” To my surprise, Susan Cogan (Utah State University) and several other scholars responded with “I love how so many of us have favorite desks.” Susan’s response prompted me to ask several scholars what makes being a reader at the British Library special. I received a variety of responses. Desks in the Rare Books and Music Reading Room. Photo by Linda C. Mitchell. The most popular response from readers mentioned the abundance of riches at the British Library. Jack Lynch (Rutgers University) emphasized that “There’s no richer collection in the world than the British library—15 million books and manuscripts in every language you’ve ever heard of (and many you haven’t). What John Dryden said of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is true of the BL: ‘Here is God’s plenty!’” Nicholas Brownlees (University of Florence) had...
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