ELEXIS tools and services

by David Jost Comment Closed
17 ELEXIS partners are constantly developing and improving ELEXIS tools and services for lexicography. https://elex.is/tools-and-services/ We are constantly enriching our resources to enable smart research not only for lexicographers and researches in Natural Language Processing, but also for teachers and other professionals without formal training in lexicography. And what better way to start off a new school year than with newly developed resources? Below, you can find a comprehensive overview of all open-access resources that are currently available. The newest ones are listed first, but you can find a quick list of all resources right here: OneClick DictionaryClustyNAISCElexifierVerbAtlasSyntagNetSketchEngineLexonomyElexifinderLexicographic newsfeed...
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New Editor of Dictionaries

by David Jost Comment Closed
The Executive Board of DSNA is delighted to announce that Lynne Murphy has been appointed as the next Editor of Dictionaries, to take over the role when Ed Finegan steps down next year. Lynne is an accomplished lexicologist and theoretical semanticist, the author of Semantic Relations and the Lexicon (Cambridge UP, 2003) and Lexical Meaning (Cambridge UP, 2010), as well as co-author of Key Terms in Semantics (Bloomsbury, 2010) and Antonyms in English (Cambridge, 2012). She is also author of the extremely popular The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship between American and British English (Penguin, 2018), written with support of a very competitive National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for public-facing scholarship. She is the Lynneguist behind the blog, Separated by a Common Language. She has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Baylor University, and the University of Sussex, and has been a member of DSNA at least since 1992, when she was studying for her Ph.D. with Ladislav Zgusta at the University of Illinois. Lynne’s scholarly sophistication and command of style,...
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Call for Papers 23 Biennial DSNA

by David Jost Comment Closed
Call for Papers The 23rd Biennial Dictionary Society of North America Conference will be held at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in June 2021. Presentations on any aspect of lexicography and lexicology in any language are welcome. Those focused on aspects of lexicology and lexicography of the American West are particularly encouraged. The conference will feature a workshop and plenary panel on lexicography of indigenous North American languages. All presenters must be members of the DSNA. To join or renew membership, click on the “Join Us!” link at the website dictionarysociety.com. The program will begin with presentations on the evening of Wednesday, June 2 and will run through Saturday afternoon, June 5. Workshop proposals (including pedagogy sessions) should be between 800 and 1000 words, excluding references. Submit these to Orin Hargraves, the conference host, at orin.hargraves@colorado.edu. Abstracts for presentations of 20 minutes, 10 minutes Q&A, are invited. Submission of abstracts (300-500 words) is via EasyAbs (http://linguistlist.org/easyabs/DSNA2021Boulder). Please do not put any self-identifying references in...
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Publishing Information Fall 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...
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Quotations Elizabeth Knowles Fall 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...
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State of Lexicography Orin Hargraves Fall 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...
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History Middle English Dictionary Staff Fall 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....
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Education Fall 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...
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Madeline Kripke 1943-2020

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,...
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