Demos ,"the think tank for everyday democracy" (at least, that's what they call themselves on their website) has "called for the Oxford English Dictionary to be replaced as the leading authority on English by a website listing new words suggested by the public in the UK and overseas." (according to a story in The Independent)

They want this site to be called democtionary.org and have put up a call for help at that URL.

I'm absolutely, positively, 100% FOR the idea of having web-based, user-generated new word collecting, but the idea that one-dictionary-fits-all gives me a headache. The OED is not a list of the birth announcements of shiny new words, it's more like a genealogical document that traces the family tree of each word included. How that would be replaced efficiently by a new-words-only website I leave as an exercise for the reader.

Labels: historical_dictionaries, wikis

So, McDonald's is, again, trying to get McJob out of "the dictionary." This time they're going after the OED; last time they were gunning for Merriam-Webster. (Why no mention of M-W this time? Did they think, "Well, Springfield's a tough bunch, but the OED should roll over like a litter of puppies"?)

Here's a link about the story from BoingBoing, and here's a link from the OUP blog (which also includes a link to me talking about it on Chicago Public Radio).

I'm sure I don't need to explain to y'all that 1) lexicographers do not bow to corporate pressure (we also don't negotiate with terrorists), and 2) the way to get a word "out of the dictionary" is to convince all the people who are using the word in a way you don't like to stop. Obviously, since #2 is patently impossible, at least on the usual PR person's timescale, persons with a word to grind often resort to leaning on lexicographers.

I just don't understand this. It didn't work in 2003; it's not going to work now. Also, McJob is not really a very frequent term; by doing all these press shenanigans McDonald's is probably vastly increasing the number of people who will hear about it and who might now be tempted to use it in the sense that McDonald's deplores ("a low-paid job with few prospects").

What if, instead of spending money on this ill-conceived campaign, they added another grant to their employee scholarship program and publicized that? Or maybe increased their employee surveys, to find out what their employees really think of their jobs, and publicized that result (if it turned out positively, of course, and I have no reason to think it wouldn't). A press release that started "McJob? No, McSuccess!" or something similarly hokey, trumpeting the general satisfaction, opportunity for advancement, etc. of entry-level workers, especially women, minorities, and the disabled, would probably get just as much play in the press as this misguided attempt to police the usage of McJob.

I did a quick check of the Oxford English Corpus, and found that the most common "Mc" word in the corpus (after discarding all the "Mc" surnames like mine and the name McDonald's itself) was McNugget/s (counting plural and singular together), followed by McWorld, McMansion/s, McJob/s, and then McFlurry. (I was slightly disappointed to learn that McFondle is a surname, as are McLearn and McComas. Once you start seeing "Mc" as a disparaging prefix, everything looks slightly off.)

I'm sure this McStory will disappear faster than a sleeve of those hot, delicious fries. But what a waste of everyone's time until then!

Labels: trademarks

Check out this lovely story about the new revision of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles.

Just what is a Canadianism?
Walter Avis, editor of the first dictionary, defined it as “a word, expression or meaning which is native to Canada or which is distinctively characteristic of Canadian usage though not necessarily exclusive to Canada.”

Words mentioned in the article include timbits, parkade, grow-op, and BlackBerry. (Didn't know the BlackBerry was a Canadian invention? Me either.)

Have a Canadianism of your own to submit? There's an email link in the article.

Labels: Canada, historical_dictionaries

Ben Zimmer, who never sleeps (at least not when words are in question or peril) has discovered (via the Wordsmith.org forums, where a user there, Joe Friday, gives the probable origin of the 'fish' part of the 'being hit by a fish' meaning given for cornobble.

It seems that in Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words: Gathered from Numerous and Diverse Authoritative Sources, cornobble is included, with the gloss of "hit by a fist". Then the book (or at least the part with cornobble) was put online, on various and sundry web pages, with one or more of them changing "fist" to "fish". Simple enough.

Charlie Elster was also asked about this problem by the resourceful Mr. Friday, and he figured that Mrs. Byrne had found the word in Wright's English Dialect Dictionary (soon to be online, or one hopes), where, in fact, it is. (According to that same Joe Friday, who intrepidly called his local library to ask them to look it up for him -- you'd be surprised at how happy most librarians are to do this for you, just try it and see!). In that book the meaning is given as "to beat on".

So, the question now is: knowing all this, can you still use cornobbled to mean "hit by a fish"? Well, yes. There are plenty of examples of errors or reanalyzings transmitted in English that have become more-or-less standard: apron used to a napron, and so forth. And since there is such a huge lexical gap here to be filled [whoops, Ben posted some in the comments] -- there are no other English words for hitting or being hit by a fish, as far as I know -- I think we can go ahead and keep this one.

[ETA: more fish words in comments, and picture of Lew Zealand. Because every post is improved by MUPPETS!]

Labels: errors, fish, muppets