Blog Posts

“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...

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...

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...

 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...

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...

DARE Wrap-up Joan Hall In early December, the last 238 boxes of documents recording the nearly sixty-year history of the Dictionary of American Regional English made their way to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives. (And those followed several hundred earlier boxes!) The closing of the DARE offices in Helen White Hall was necessitated by lack of funding. Sorting through the correspondence, grant applications, progress reports, financial records, conference plans, computer programs, meeting minutes, etc., was both tedious and fascinating. Over my four years of cataloging, I discovered the details of early DARE history that I had only heard about previously; I was reminded of the disproportionate amount of Fred Cassidy’s and my time that had to be devoted to fund raising; and I appreciated anew the decades of labor and the dedication of the people who brought the project from fieldwork to a digital edition. With respect to the fund raising, it was gratifying to see that, despite all the rejection letters, over the decades we managed to maintain a collaboration among federal agencies, private foundations, the UW-Madison, a...

Executive Board update The Board has had two fruitful meetings since September, focused primarily on two major points of business. The first, and most exciting, is DSNA23. We are pleased to announce that our next biennial conference will be held June 2-5, 2021, at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Orin Hargraves has been hard at work forming a conference committee, and the Board is very excited about how things are shaping up. Save the date! The other point of business is to help develop a strategic plan for the DSNA’s future. Lexicography and lexicology in North America have changed dramatically since our founding 45 years ago, and the Board has felt that the time is ripe for reevaluation. The DSNA is doing much better than many small academic societies: we have seen a gradual drop in membership, but our gradually increasing revenue from the journal has made up for the lack of membership dues, and so we enter this next season better off than many other societies, and from a position of strength. That said,...

Two books by Stefan Dollinger centered on the theme of pluricentricity (national perspectives on language variation) appeared in late 2019. The first, Creating Canadian English: the Professor, the Mountaineer, and a National Variety of English (Cambridge University Press, 2019) is lexicographic-historical in focus, as it details the development, implementation, and “invention” of Canadian English from the 1940s to the present. It is an archival study of long-forgotten linguists that may still be known in the lexicographical field: Walter S. Avis, Charles J. Lovell, and other members of the “Big Six”. Geared towards the general interest reader, the book is a mixed-genre account of the making of Canadian English. Frontmatter & Chapter 1: https://www.academia.edu/35184221/. The second book, The Pluricentricity Debate: On Austrian German and Other Germanic Standard Varieties (Routledge, 2019) is focused on Austrian German, which is presented in contrastive perspective with other Germanic varieties - Flemish, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Luxembourgish and, above all, English. This book critiques current practices in German dialectology, including lexicography, from epistemological, methodological, and practical perspectives....

To facilitate navigation the introduction now contains a TOC that lists the various sections of the Newsletter. 2. Member News 3. DSNA: In this issue you will find the Globalex reports of April through December 2019. 4. Dictionaries: Joan Hall writes movingly of the wrap-up of DARE. 5. Collections: Linda C. Mitchell praises life at the British Library. 6. Education: Connie Eble discovers the reactions of children to a special dictionary. 7. History: Vincent T. McCarren describes his work editing a manuscript of the Medulla and Eugene Green compares works in Old and Middle English. 8. State of Lexicography: Orin Hargraves tells us how he has helped other lexicographers. 9. Quotations: Elizabeth Knowles looks at the background of the quotation on Agatha Christie’s tombstone. 10.  Publication Information on this issue of the Newsletter 11. Conferences: Orin Hargraves announces the DSNA’s next conference and Lise Winer lists conferences of interest....