Comments on: Glossographia

By: Elizabeth Stigler

Elizabeth Stigler — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 16:24:20 +0000

I recently attended a lively lecture on dictionaries by Erin McKean, a young “Dictionary Evangelist” (her term) and the chief consulting editor for american dictionaries at Oxford University Press. I hope I’m remembering correctly when I describe the thesis of her talk as roughly this–That a “true” working dictionary is a living record, i.e. it accounts for the way people currently use language vs. what is technically correct. Hence, Mlinko’s comment on the evolution of the word “thing” in relation to Pinsky’s latest book ( http://poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2007/12/some_debts.html#more ). What’s interesting about language is that it is not cast in stone, the working meaning is found in the way people use the tool as opposed to more normative understandings. A living, breathing poetry in dictionaries! Whoa, that sentence is way too lame for an exclamation point.
For further reading, I would check out her books:
Weird and Wonderful Words
More Weird and Wonderful Words
Totally Weird and Wonderful Words
That’s Amore (about words as well)
An aside: McKean also hosts a great daily blog called A Dress A Day, on vintage dresses, here: http://www.dressaday.com/dressaday.html
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 13:29:24 +0000

Great find, Mary, and great example, too!
“Straddlebug” was a pretty common word throughout the 19th century but seems to have vanished by the middle of the 20th. “Peeker” wouldn’t get a separate entry in most dictionaries, but it turns up in the 1920 tome Allen’s Synonyms and Antonyms by Frederic Sturges Allen, who was a dictionary editor himself. Unsurprisingly (compared to “straddlebug,” anyhow), it just meant “peeping Tom;” no wonder it disappeared. And no wonder Woolf gave up! If you’d like some further lexical entertainment, check out H.L. Mencken’s The American Language.
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By: Mary Meriam

Mary Meriam — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 04:06:52 +0000

Hi Don – I seemed to remember that Woolf had something to say about dictionaries. Sure enough, I found this essay, which begins:
In 1938 Virginia Woolf started to compile her own “Supplement to the Dictionary of the English Language,” but gave up after two words. The third entry is simply a question mark, a lexical gap representing “A word for those who put living people into books.”
(The words are “straddlebug” and “peeker.”)
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