Dictionary Evangelist

Dictionary piece in the Boston Globe yesterday

2008-05-12T11:03:00.003-05:00

Yesterday a piece I wrote about Johnny Carrera's Pictorial Webster's ran in the Boston Globe ... check it out, if beautiful art books inspired by dictionaries are topics of interest.

Semicolon Followup

2008-02-26T16:58:00.003-06:00

Many thanks for all the kind words about the Semicolon Appreciation Society!

Here are some followup links, in case you just can't get enough semicolon in your online diet:

Some letters to the NYT about the original story [Thanks to RLE for the link]

Trevor Butterworth sent me a link his longer article in the Financial Times, back in 2005, in which he outlines a purported American bias against the semicolon. (I believe Americans use fewer semicolons per capita, but more as a nation, in a kind of reverse image of our carbon footprint ...)

The Semicolon's Dream Journal [exactly what it says on the box]

Semicolon Appreciation Society

2008-02-22T08:30:00.003-06:00

After all the recent discussion of the semicolon (in the NYTimes and other places) I couldn't resist the urge to make Semicolon Appreciation Society T-Shirts. Because, really, if a thing is worth talking about, it's certainly worth wearing.

Here's the back (on the white/light shirts only, no back printing on dark shirts):

I also made some 3x5 stickers, so you can edit signs to add semicolons where they ought to be:

And, of course, a membership card:

Although I'm not happy with the wording of it. Anyone want to suggest new wording that actually, you know, includes a semicolon?

I was thinking that the Semicolon Appreciation Society's bylaws should be like those of humorous WWII servicemen's associations, with riddles and having to forfeit the price of a drink if you can't write a sentence including a semicolon on demand. Suggestions for further bylaws entertained in the comments.

Thanks are due to Garth, who recklessly encouraged me, and India Amos, who suggested the completely wonderful Cooper Poster font as the one that included the platonic ideal of the semicolon form.

Ask The Dictionary Evangelist

2008-02-19T08:55:00.003-06:00

A Mr. John Shakespeare [I know! Isn't that perfect?] had a question for me, and kindly gave his permission for me to share my answer with all of you.

I just read your interesting and amusing piece, Neologizing 101, in the NY Times. [I did not ask him to say this. —Ed.] Neologizing is the invention of a word; invention seems (to me, at least) to imply copyright. So my questions are: How does one prove invention of a new word? And, how does one copyright that invention, and make royalties (ie; /moolah/) from it?

I realize I'm not the first person to ask you such questions. I've been having a lot of trouble finding the answers on the net, though. So, I would be very grateful of any hints you could throw my way.

Respectfully,

John Shakespeare

First off: IANAL (I am not a lawyer), trademark or otherwise. Real lawyers should feel free to weigh in, that's what blog comments are for.

The short answer, though, is that a word is not copyrightable; you can register a
word as a trademark, connected to a product or service, but you can't copyright it.

This is, I think, because a copyright is a very limited right, and not an absolute property right. Copyrights came about to encourage authors to write by allowing them a limited monopoly over their work; as you can well imagine, that doesn't quite work for words. A word, once created, belongs to the language, not to you. You must share it for it to be effective as a word. (And most neologizers need no encouragement to share, whether monetary or any other sort!)

And even though a word is invented, you can't patent it -- again, because the point of a new word is to get it into use, not to restrict its use. Patents are less about granting a right for YOU to use something and more about keeping OTHER people from using it -- which doesn't make sense for words: "Here's my new word, sorry, you can't speak, read, or write it." Words have no value when kept apart from the language as a whole. More practically, there is no mechanism for charging a fee for the use of any particular word. (How on earth could you? Even if you could do it for print & broadcast media, you couldn't do it for casual speech ... )

Trademarks are the association of a word with a particular product, so as to protect the consumer (who wants to know that their Bon Ami powder is, in fact, Bon Ami, and not some other thing). They are not a license to control the use of a word in all situations. The fact that we have Apple Computers and Apple Records and Apple Tours doesn't mean we are suddenly barred from calling the fruit an apple, too. And you can Google things and get spam in your inbox and Roomba your living room ... trademark owners don't like the use of their trademarks as verbs but they cannot FORBID it.

It's better to look at your new word creation as a gift you give back to the language as a whole, rather than as a land-grab you can monetize. The English language has (ostensibly) been good to you; why not give something back?

[Have a question for the Dictionary Evangelist? There's an email link up there on the right ...]

Happy Valentine's Day!

2008-02-14T16:24:00.003-06:00

Many thanks to Jen who sent me the link to this:

(The stockist is sold out of it (sadly) but they'll let you know when it's back if you ask them nicely.)

Enjoy your virtual alphabet-themed chocolate. More new lexicographical content shortly.

Cheat at Scrabble!

2008-01-18T10:31:00.001-06:00

Yes, yes, you heard me. But it's for a good cause. (And anyway, I've posted this too late for you to actually sign up to cheat at Scrabble; now you can just go watch other miscreants cheat at Scrabble. I meant to post this Monday ... but I suppose you can just consider this as me being over-protective.)

826NYC.org, a non-profit that encourages young writers, is having a fundraiser Scrabble tournament TOMORROW, January 19, at their offices at 372 Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn.

The tournament is a benefit for their writing programs, and it has a twist: teams sign up and raise sponsorship money. Each team is allowed a certain number of "cheats" that they buy with the money they raised. So the more money a team raises for 826NYC, the more likely they are to win. Genius!

Here's the price list:

1. Trade out a letter—$25
2. Wheel of Fortune: buy a vowel—$50
3. Flip a letter over and make it blank—$100
4. Add 10 to any letter’s value—$150
5. Add Q, Z, or X to any word, anywhere—$200
6. Passport: play a word in any language—$250
7. Consult the dictionary for one turn—$300
8. Consult the Scrabble word list for one turn—$400
9. Reject another team’s word—$450
10. Invent a word (must have a definition)—$500

Obviously, I'm most interested in #s 7 and 10. For #7, which dictionary are they going to use? A big dictionary is going to be much more valuable than a little one, and a dictionary of abbreviations would be excellent for humorous effect ... And for #10 -- I hope they record the new words and definitions!

I'm also very pleased that inventing a word is the priciest cheat. Just as it should be ...

If any of you gentle readers attend, would you leave a report in the comments? I'd go myself, save for the trifling inconvenience of living in Chicago ...

What Would James Murray Do?

2008-01-08T13:57:00.001-06:00

Many thanks to Judah, who just sent me this link to the webcomic Bathos, which includes the new words "Oxfording" and "resoneged". Go. Click.

I suppose it's worth mentioning that for YEARS I had and wore a t-shirt that said "I never should have used the word bathos", huh? It's a long story, but no, I don't have any connection with the folks behind this comic (other than having thoroughly enjoyed it).

Not really dictionary-related, but ...

2007-12-24T08:46:00.000-06:00

I had a piece in the Boston Globe's Ideas section yesterday about Christmas Superstitions.

If you love reading about old superstitions (and I really do), hie yourself to Google Book Search and look for British Popular Customs, Present and Past. Be warned, though, that reading aloud from this to others is something that can be done only in very small doses. There's a limit to how many "Did you know"s? most people want to hear ....

Sleazy and Restoring

2007-12-18T10:11:00.001-06:00

[picture from Flickr -- thanks, bradlauster!]

David Smay sent me a link to a lovely long article in the Guardian about using unusual words: From albedo to zugunruhe, in which the author, James Meek, talks about words he hasn't known and his own uneasiness about using rarer (but more exact) words.

It also has this great quote in it:

The point at which a man starts finding discrepancies in dictionaries is probably the point at which he should go for a long holiday to a place that is sleazy and restoring.

My take (and yes, I know it's self-serving, in that I make dictionaries) is that, in belletristic writing, when presented with an otherwise-equal choice between a fun, unusual word, and a boring, commonplace word, you should always choose the unusual one. Why deny your readers the "aha!" moment of finding a perfectly apt, elegantly descriptive word?

(Of course, I also think "when in doubt, wear orange," so you perhaps should take this with a grain of salt.)

Literary writing is a way to introduce readers not just to facts and ideas and emotions but to beautiful words: imagine writing a guidebook to a place that left out the best restaurants because they weren't on the subway line ... if something is worthwhile, people will find a way to get there. If a word is perfect, people will figure it out.

I am NOT suggesting that technical or workaday writing should be full of fifty-cent words; "This way to the egress" is a scam, not an invitation to learning. (Or, at least, not an invitation to learning that is received gratefully!) But literature, long-form journalism, and essay writing allow for more lexical scope, and you should take advantage of it, to the best of your ability. Why not?

Following Up from Ignite ...

2007-12-12T16:23:00.001-06:00

I keep meaning to post versions of the various talks I've given (the ones that are not videos) but I haven't yet, for myriad reasons ... including trying to get actual work done. But the Ignite talk I gave was pretty short (five minutes!), so I thought I'd try to put it up here.

Slide 1: I always include a definition of 'lexicographer' when I talk; keeps people from elbowing their neighbor and asking 'what did she say she did again'?

Slide 2: Because this was a tech talk, I also pointed out that I was a geek. (I wore this skirt, by the way, for visual reinforcement of the concept.)

Slide 3: We all think of dictionaries as very concrete, solid objects. (You wouldn't want to drop one on your foot, would you?) But actually ...

Slide 4: Dictionaries might be solid, but their innards are really collections of ABSTRACTIONS. Definitions are made by taking a lot of specific datapoints (uses of a word in context) ...

Slide 5: ... and averaging them out to a more general meaning.

Slide 6: This may seem really obvious to YOU ... [note: this is my favorite Flickr image EVER]

Slide 7: But many people think that lexicographers just "decide" what a word means. Nope! That would be really hard work ... it's easier (and more accurate) to look at examples of use.

Slide 8: What can you tell about this word [pirgate] from these examples? Well, I bet you know it's a verb, that you can do it TO something, and that it's something you might not want to do. This is all information you know implicitly because you know how English works.

Slide 9: How about now? Now you know this use is a noun, and it's a kind of person -- the kind of person you don't want to be, probably.

Slide 10: The truth is that "meaning" is created by lots of little points of data, in the same way that persistence-of-vision effects are created by lots of little points of light. A diffuse set of data can look pretty solid if it moves fast enough ...

Slide 11: But you really do have to have ENOUGH data for this persistence-of-vision effect to work. If I say a guy is wearing a tux and holding a martini, is he a waiter, or is he James Bond? You don't have enough data to tell.

Slide 12: So lexicographers in their labs try to distill all those usage data points into high-octane liquid definitions.

Slide 13: Now, if you want to brew your own, and want a lot of examples of use, there are more places than ever to try to find them ...

Slide 14: Although it doesn't work for every word ... (especially not 'pirgate', since I made it up).

Slide 16: And, of course, the examples you DO find might not be helpful.

Slide 16: The big question, though, isn't really WHERE to find enough examples -- that's pretty straightforward. The big question is: if we agree that dictionary definitions are abstractions of meaning, is there a better way to represent those abstractions than this:

Slide 17: ... the boring old print dictionary?

Slide 18: Could we show relationships between examples in a less-linear way?

Slide 19: Could we convey those abstractions in a more powerful way?

Slide 20: That's the problem I'm working on every day ... [go visit my blog, yadda yadda, big plug for Creative Commons and the awesome nice sharing people on Flickr.]

(All my presentations are Creative Commons-sharealike, by the way, so if you ever want to remix me into a rap song or create a dictionary-talk novel or whatever, go right on ahead. If you see me speak somewhere and want a copy of my slide deck, just email and ask.]

And that's what I talked about at Ignite last Thursday. More or less. I didn't make any notes, so this is from what I remember of what I said off the top of my head!

Tonight, Chicago Ignite

2007-12-06T10:57:00.001-06:00

I completely forgot to post that I'm talking tonight at the Chicago Ignite!

I'll be talking about dictionaries. (Whoa! Surprised you there, did I?) I'll also be bringing the estrogen to the geek potluck (in other words, I'm the only woman speaking).

It's at the Debonair Social Club, 1575 N. Milwaukee Ave. Event starts at 6 p.m., I'm talking at the end of the first block (so close to 9 p.m.)

If you're Chicago-local, hope to see you there! (If you're not Chicago-local, it's not too late to move here, y'know. I mean, it is for TONIGHT, but not in the larger context of your life plan. I'm just sayin'.) Don't let the four inches snowfall predicted for this evening put you off, or anything.

I finally found a use for Twitter

2007-12-04T06:46:00.000-06:00

Don't get me wrong -- I loved the *idea* of Twitter, I just didn't think a constant stream of messages such as

12:02 "Reading New Scientist"
12:11 "Still reading New Scientist"
12:45 "In front of computer, reading the Internet"

would be interesting. To me, or to anyone else.

But (and there's always a 'but'), Twitter is perfect for a task that I've been having trouble managing: immediate new-word filing. If I'm at my desk, sure, I can append any new-to-me words I find in my reading to a file. And if I'm out and about, I can make a note on my Treo, or in my Moleskine. But they aren't all in the Same Place, and so consolidation has to happen. (Note: I am not so good -- actually, frakkin' terrible -- at consolidation, of any sort.)

Twitter lets me post a WOTD (word-of-the-day) from anywhere, and then it is nicely stored ALL IN ONE PLACE. The limit of 140 characters per 'tweet' keeps me from rambling on and on. And it's semi-public (you can follow my messages if you like, I'm emckean on Twitter) which allows for the possibility of feedback.

If you really want a reliable, highly structured WOTD -- my Twitter feed is not for you. (What you want is Double-Tongued Dictionary.) But if you just want to ride shotgun while I read, go ahead and add me to your "follow" list.

If *you* want to do the same thing with the words you notice, go ahead and use the tag "wotd:" -- Twitter has a 'track' function, so if you prefix your messages with this tag, I'll be able to follow your new words easily. Fun, no? (BTW, Twitter is free.)

I'll try to keep my Twitter feed just for the WOTDs -- although a few rollerskating or "seeing-cool-music" tweets might make it through. Just a warning.

And the word of the year is ...

2007-11-12T18:18:00.000-06:00

Locavore.

Oxford announced its Word of the Year today, plus the list of runners-up (which included, in alphabetical order: aging in place, bacn, cloudware, colony collapse disorder, cougar, MRAP vehicle, mumblecore, social graph, tase (or taze), previvor, and upcycling).

It's always fun to be involved in picking the word of the year, although after two years of researching, arguing, persuading, and negotiating (not to mention the concentrated application of some world-class Google-fu) to promote my candidates for Oxford's WOTY (2005: podcast, 2006: carbon neutral), it was a relief to let Ben Zimmer take over the heavy lifting ... and it means I can do a little second-guessing and show you some of the words on my list that didn't make it to the short list. Call them the runners-up to the runners-up, a sort of semi-honorable mention.

There weren't many, but the ones too good to let get away include:

brick: to cause an electronic device to become permanently nonfunctional (this word got a lot of play when people's cracked iPhones were bricked by the firmware update)

hypermiler: someone who uses various driving strategies to maximize fuel efficiency

griefer: someone who deliberately promotes discord, especially in online environments

jatropha: a plant whose nuts can be used to produce biodiesel

unconference: a conference where the agenda or schedule is set by the attendees

There you have it ... if you're hungry for more Word-of-the-Year (or as we call it, WOTY) action, there's always the American Dialect WOTY vote in early January. (This year it's in Chicago!)

Pop!Tech, how I miss you

2007-10-18T11:38:00.000-05:00

Last year I was lucky enough to go to Pop!Tech and give an incredibly geeky talk (you can see it here). How geeky was it? Well, it was called "All Your Text Are Belong To Us." (If you don't get the joke, you can rest comfortably in the knowledge that You Are Not A Geek.)

Although I wish I were in gorgeous Camden, Maine, listening to the talks in the equally gorgeous Camden Opera House, I can, like a good little blogger, watch the 2007 live webcast at home while sitting on the exercise ball that pretends it's my office chair.

I'm really looking forward to some of the presenters in particular -- Nina Jablonski sounds fascinating, and I'm a huge fan of Jonathan Harris already ...

If you haven't heard of Pop!Tech -- check it out!

[The image is a poster that was drawn during my talk by Peter Durand of Alphachimp.]

A perfect example

2007-10-16T08:27:00.000-05:00

I often talk about how some words seem to hover in the ether (or aether, if you prefer) and will themselves into being, often by jumping into multiple brains near-simultaneously. And now I have a great example of this phenomenon, which I can share with you.

I just (and by 'just', I mean 'in the past several weeks') got a lovely email from Anthony Durity, in response to my TED talk, and letting me know a word he invented, ygology. Ygology, is, of course, the study of palindromes.

Now, I thought, that's a cool word. Let's Google it. So I did, and found some competing coinage claims.

Which, frankly, only makes sense. Knowing what a palindrome is, and knowing the suffix -ology, ygology was inevitable. It had to be born; English almost demanded it.

It's probably possible (with some taking of depositions) to determine exactly who first used ygology, and when, and in response to what ... but why bother? We have the word, which is the important thing, after all. I think coining claims should be like Nobels; nobody minds if two or three people win one together.

The illustration above is an ambigram, a kind of visual palindrome, done by John Langdon. Check out his website!

"What Came First" in the Globe

2007-10-14T10:31:00.000-05:00

I got to sub for the wonderful Jan Freeman and camp out in her usual space at the Boston Globe today -- here's the column I wrote about antedating. (Registration may be required, or you can try BugMeNot.com for a password if you prefer not to register.)

Thanks again to Grant Barrett and Ben Zimmer for all their help and great examples ...

(Don't worry, it doesn't have anything to do with the Geico Cavemen.)

RIP Ned Sherrin

2007-10-05T08:55:00.000-05:00

I was very sorry to hear that Ned Sherrin had died; he is the genius behind one of my favorite magazine features of all time, the funeral-review column in The Oldie, a magazine for British senior citizens. Yep, he would attend memorial service and review them -- was the eulogy fitting? Where was it held? Did anyone unusual turn up? Were the hymns and readings appropriate?

I can't seem to find a link to one of his columns, but you can take my word for it -- they were tremendously entertaining, even when you had no idea who any of the people mentioned were (which happens quite a bit with me and The Oldie -- seeing as how I am at least thirty years younger than their target audience and American to boot, I have little to no recollection of B-list British celebrities and politicians of the 1950s and 60s).

I wonder who will review his memorial?

Weird Words -- ossicusp

2007-10-03T10:33:00.001-05:00

Last week I got a query (directed to my other blog, but really more suited to this one), about whether or not there was a special word for someone who studies giraffes, the way people who study reptiles are called herpetologists.

Odd and disappointing as this may seem, this was not something I knew off the top of my head, so I went into research mode. First I did an "advanced search" in the OED, searching for any entry that contained the word giraffe in the definition. That didn't turn up any likely words, so I went to Google Book Search, looking for various strings including the words giraffe, scientist, zoologist, study etc.

That turned up Pursuing Giraffe: A 1950s Adventure, which looked amazing ... and whose author, Anne Innis Dagg, was living and teaching in Canada.

So, a few more searches and I had an email address for Professor Dagg, and she replied, very graciously, that there were so few people studying giraffe (giraffe can have the same form for singular and plural, like deer) that there wasn't a special term that she knew of, although people have jokingly used giraffologist.

So that's one word query down (and roughly 500,000 still outstanding). The best parts of this query, as always, were the things I learned along the way: I've added Pursuing Giraffe to my to-read list (books on women's struggle to be taken seriously as scientists are always gripping reading) and I learned the word ossicusp -- which is a very rare term for the skin-covered horns on the head of a giraffe (or an okapi).

How many times have you looked at a giraffe and never wondered if those funny horns had a special name? Now you know, and you'll never look at a giraffe (or, presumably, an okapi, should you run across one) the same way again.

[SECRET MESSAGE TO LITERARY SOJOURN ATTENDEES: The secret word is ossicusp. Write it down!]

What's a Define-A-Thon, You Ask?

2007-09-26T10:42:00.001-05:00

Your question is answered here, and it's (most likely) coming to a bookstore near you.

So if you want to walk away with a prize from the American Heritage Dictionaries (and have the vocabulary-chops to do so) I'd call your favorite local bookstore and ask them to participate sometime during National American Heritage Dictionary Define-a-Thon Week. It has to happen during the official week for you to get a prize ... otherwise you'll just get a certificate [PDF] and the joy of winning.

Has anyone participated in one of these yet? I really want to see one. I guess I'd be disqualified from entering, though. :-)

Guestblogging Alert

2007-09-25T09:58:00.000-05:00

I tried to post this all day yesterday and was THWARTED by Blogger, so it's hardly an alert by now, but I'm guestblogging all this week at The Volokh Conspiracy (only their style is to hyphenate, so there I am guest-blogging).

Check it out if you are so inclined; I'm discussing Dictionary Myths. Yesterday's myth is that lexicographers are word-judging super-aesthetes. Today I talked about why the word inartful isn't in dictionaries.

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Present and Future

2007-09-20T08:04:00.000-05:00

The sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has just been published today, which reminded me of this great bit of future-osity in William Gibson's Count Zero:

She watched Andrea prop up the kitchen window with a frayed, blue-backed copy of the second volume of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, sixth edition.

Now that's some good futurizing: a character is propping up a window with the sixth edition of a book that at the time Count Zero was first published, back in 1986, was still in its third edition.

Of course now that we do have the sixth edition of the Shorter, can we hope that real cyberspace, autonomous, slightly creepy AIs, and the rise of the corporation-state are not far behind? (Perhaps "hope" is not the word I'm looking for here.)

If you want more on the actual release of this edition of the Shorter and much, much less on dictionary cameos in science-fiction novels, then you probably want to check out this post by Ben Zimmer over at the OUP Blog.

[Disclaimer: I did not have anything to do with the editing of the Shorter, although I did help a tiny bit in putting together some publicity materials for today's launch.]

I don't want to be snitty about this

2007-09-18T09:25:00.001-05:00

But this AP article about new words in Merriam-Webster is not all it could be.

The year was 1989, and "snitty" started off strong. The word popped up in the Los Angeles Times in January, then appeared in the March and August editions of People magazine.

It was one of hundreds of words being tracked by editors at Merriam-Webster who are always searching for new terms to enter into the Collegiate Dictionary.

But something went wrong. The editors, who were eager to define snitty as "disagreeably agitated," no longer saw the word in national newspapers and magazines. Snitty fizzled. Although it was commonly used in conversation, Merriam-Webster's editors could only find three examples of its use in print. They had no choice but to reject it.

They began noticing it again 2005, first in Entertainment Weekly and then in several newspapers. With about a dozen examples of snitty being published, the term is now a likely shoo-in for next year's Collegiate.

When it comes to making it into Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, spoken word isn't enough.

"We need evidence that it's being used in print," said senior editor Jim Lowe, who is at a loss to explain snitty's six-year publication gap.

Well, it would be difficult to explain a gap that's not there. Lexis-Nexis shows 232 instances of snitty in newspapers before 2005, going back as far as 1978. There are seven instances of its use in the New York Times, 1984–2005. Google Book Search also shows pre-2005 examples, including one from Lucky by Jackie Collins (what, nobody at M-W ever reads beach books?) and a reference in John Ayto's 1992 Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang. It's also in the OED, with four citations from 1978–1987.

The thing is, though, that anyone who relies primarily on eyeballs-to-the-page reading (and the article states "The editors spend hours reading everything from science and medical journals to entertainment and fashion magazines. ... New-looking words are highlighted, and the passage in which they are discovered is typed onto an index card and entered into a computer database.") is going to have this same problem.

Leaving aside the boggling "typed onto an index card" (!!! -- why not enter it directly into the database and then print out index cards if you want them?) this process is a misuse of editorial time.

Instead of having editors read print magazines, why not dump the magazines into a large digital database and use simple sorting and search to find new words? People, even lexicographers, are notoriously inattentive when asked to perform visual tasks. Let the computer, which never sleeps (we're assuming it's not running Vista) do the watching, and let the lexicographers do the analysis.

I'm not saying a database will find ALL the new words -- or that if a lexicographer sees a new word 'in the wild' that he or she shouldn't make a quick note -- but, as fun as it may be to get paid to read Entertainment Weekly, it's not very efficient. I'd rather get paid to suss out how words are being used, not to find them in the first place. Doing new-word-finding by reading, instead of databasing, is like finding underground water by dowsing when you have access to a ground-penetrating-radar satellite.

I should also point out that, despite the inclusion of snitty in the OED, none of the current-English dictionaries has included it yet, as far as I can tell. Of course, none of them have started adding large-circulation popular magazines to their databases yet, either. So it's not like Merriam-Webster is really falling behind ... it's just that they're not as far out in front as they could be. Think of what those 40 lexicographers (which is what the article says M-W has devoted to their reading program) could define with all that extra time!

The article also talks about the Seinfeldian regift, and says that other dictionaries, including the New Oxford American Dictionary, don't yet include it. NOAD actually does include regift ... Orin Hargraves (who I think was the first person to define regift in his 2004 book New Words) has already pointed this out, though, so all you NOAD partisans don't need to email Adam Gorlick at the AP to correct him.

A Million in Prizes

2007-09-13T17:37:00.000-05:00

In my last post I offered a prize to anyone who left a poem rhyming rynt and pint in the comments, and, since we had four entries, that makes it easy to award first place, second place, and two honorable mentions.

First prize was a copy of More Weird and Wonderful Words (but I didn't mention what the other prizes would be, as I didn't think I'd award any others at that point). But since I hate to pass up a chance to Make Everyone A Winner, I am, and they are, as follows:

Second prize: a schwa t-shirt:

Honorable mention: the latest issue of VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly.

I think GarbageDonkey wins first prize by sheer volume; Jonathan Caws-Elwitt second, and Taylor McKnight and Adjal honorable mentions. Email me your addresses and I'll get them sent off right away.

Congratulations to all the winners! You may now put "Winner, 2007 Dictionary Evangelist Poetry Contest" on your cvs.

Poets rejoice! (Maybe.)

2007-09-04T17:39:00.000-05:00

For a while I've been worrying, in a desultory way, about how to find out, computationally, how many words in English (how many already-dictionaried words, that is) don't have rhymes. By computationally, I mean "lazily, and in a way that doesn't involve muttering under my breath."

I've been thinking what one could do (if one were slightly more motivated than I have been to date) is sort all the pronunciation transcriptions in a largish dictionary in reverse order (that is, sort them from the final character to the first character) and then look for unique strings in the final syllables. I'm sure this is probably something one (again, one slightly more ept than I) could do completely in the Terminal window with *nix tools and the right text file.

I was reminded of this nebulous maybe-someday plan yesterday while getting my son some ice cream after dinner. It was rock-hard, so we put the container in the microwave, which has a handy "soften pint" setting. "Soften /pint/," my son read, as I pushed the button. "No, it's /paInt/," I told him, and we quickly discussed (the ice cream was melting, after all) that yes, it's /mint/ and /hint/ and /flint/ and so on, but /paInt/.

Today I remembered (while looking up something completely different) to do a quick search in the OED for the string /*aInt/ in pronunciations, and hey! There is a rhyme for pint! It's rynt, a word marked "north." in the OED. One of the citations, from 1820, is "Rynt thee, is an expression used by milk-maids to a cow when she has been milked, to bid her get out of the way," and so, in less cow-specific contexts, rynt means to stand aside.

But -- does rynt really rhyme with pint, in use? Rynt is also marked "refl." in the OED, which means that it's reflexive -- that is, it has a reflexive pronoun as its object. You can't just rynt; you have to rynt YOURSELF, which moves the rhyme back a bit from the end of the line, unless you invert the usual order and do object-verb. I suppose a good poet could make it work; I'm not going to try ... (but if anyone feels like composing a poem rhyming pint and rynt and posting it in the comments, I promise to send the best effort a copy of More Weird and Wonderful Words).

But the point of this blog post was to point out that if you have a sufficiently well-structured database, such as is available to most lexicographers (and to the paying subscribers of the OED*), you can do this kind of specific search pretty easily, and then go off and edit Wikipedia.

[*note: if you do not subscribe to the OED.com site, check your local library, which may, and which, furthermore, may let you access it through their website with your library card!]

Request Denied

2007-08-24T15:20:00.000-05:00

I've always wanted a rubber stamp that said "REQUEST DENIED", although I don't know if I'd ever be able to bring myself to use it. (That said, I once had made, and gave to someone as a gift, a rubber stamp that was a full eleven inches wide and four inches tall, which said PISS OFF! in all caps. That was fun to pick up at the office-supply store.)

But if I did have a "REQUEST DENIED" stamp, I'd use it for this semi-serious request that was written about here, at the Volokh Conspiracy:

Instead of creating a new word to represent someone who is receiving guidance under a mentor as a 'mentee', couldn't someone (not certain of who is responsible for adding/changing definitions to the official dictionaries) simply add an additional definition to the word protege to allow for further meaning?

Okay. Let's unpack this a bit:

There is no one person who is responsible for "adding/changing definitions to the official dictionaries" -- at least, not for English, as English has no "official dictionaries." Perhaps you're thinking of French?

Dictionaries (as is, thankfully, pointed out in the original post) don't add new definitions "to allow for further meaning". "Further meanings: allowed" is the DEFAULT SETTING. You want to use protege to mean mentee? Go ahead, knock yourself out -- just be prepared to be misunderstood.

(Me, I occasionally use henimus to mean "(not a) genius", based on a MISUNDERSTANDING of this episode ["Girlfriend 2000"] from the old Chris Elliott show "Get a Life", which I think four people watched ... although the toxic-waste-doping spelling bee episode, "Chris's Brain", with its prize of a jewel-encrusted dictionary, is a Dictionary Evangelist favorite. But I don't expect to be understood when I use henimus, because it's about as obscure as you can get.)

If you don't like mentee, there's no reason you have to use it: say "the person I mentor," or some other work-around. Just because a word exists doesn't imply that its use is obligatory.

Also worth rebutting (which Volokh does quite well, but I'll throw in a couple pennies as well): the idea that if the word mentee exists, that this implies the existence of the verb to ment. I don't know where this notion came from, but English morphology is a bit more fluid than this. You can certainly go from mentor to mentee without having to postulate some missing-link verb *ment. Although, frankly, I'm considering using ment now (strictly jocularly, and on my own recognizance) just to piss those anti-mentee people off.

To sum up: yes, mentee is a slightly awkward word. Give it time to grow up a bit, or use a work-around of some sort ... although if you decide to repurpose another word, be prepared for some "what?" reactions. But, please, don't waste your time or anyone else's trying to get a dictionary to record a change that hasn't yet happened in the language. We have enough to do keeping up with the changes that have!

Thanks to Kat for the link!