I'm sort of fascinated by dictionary purists who bemoan the use of any word not found in the OED when you consider the origin of so many words in our language.
These are the same sorts of people who fawn over William Shakespeare for creating ‘tranquil’ and ‘gossip’, yet any modern writer who dares to turn a noun into a verb is scoffed at as uneducated swine. It’s fascinating that we hold so much value to the words that exist that we’re reluctant to see new ones form. They’ll begrudgingly accept a few, things that had no purpose before (adding the word ‘internet’ following its invention). But fuck you if you want to use ‘oranged’ to describe something that turned orange - that’s not a word. That’s not proper English.
Even though there is a precedent for it. Even though nearly every other colour can be used as a verb (you can blue metal and your face can redden), orange hasn’t, so you can’t use it.
Taking patterns in English and expanding them or taking things that aren’t uniform and making them uniform. We have ‘terrestrial’ and ‘celestial’, and changing one to match the other. ‘Terestial’, perhaps. I’ve always thought that ‘mer’, for ‘ocean’, could be adapted into a similar sounding word to the other two. The way we’re taught to think of words and language now makes this seem silly and strange, yet this is how a great many words came to be - and is perhaps the source of every alternate spelling our language has to offer. Fitting a pattern or defining a new one.
It just bothers me to see people treat language as though it is defined by the dictionary, instead of the other way around. And it makes me sad to see how few writers create new words or use old ones in new ways. They’ll search the depths of the OED to find a beautiful word nobody’s used in centuries instead of creating their own. One that better suits the times and the context they want to use it in.
“People say to me, ‘How do I know if a word is real?’ You know, anybody who’s read a children’s book knows that love makes things real. If you love a word, use it—that makes it real. Being in the dictionary is an arbitrary distinction; it doesn’t make a word any more real than any other way. If you love a word, it becomes real.”
— lexicographer Erin McKean
Urban Dictionary Finds a Place in the Courtroom
nytimes.comCourts are looking to Urban Dictionary, a crowdsourced Web site, as one way to define words on which a case may turn.
Last month, Urban Dictionary was cited in a financial restitution case in Wisconsin, where an appeals court was reviewing the term “jack” because a convicted robber and his companion had referred to themselves as the “jack boys.”
The court noted, however, that according to Urban Dictionary, “jack” means “to steal, or take from an unsuspecting person or store.” It then rejected the convicted man’s claim that he should not have to make restitution to the owner of a van he stole to use in a robbery.
I went to a conference about dictionaries once, and it was highly interesting. The editors at the conference were very aware of crowdsourced dictionaries (Urban Dictionary and Wikipedia came up during pretty much every talk). The main tension in dictionary-making that I recall from the conference is between authority/reliability on the one hand and being fast/up-to-date on the other.
On one extreme you have the full Oxford English Dictionary, which took from 1857-1928 to create the first full 10-volume edition (that’s 71 years). The second edition (20 volumes) was published in 1989, and they’ve been working on the third edition ever since. This takes a lot of time, and imagine all the words beginning with early letters of the alphabet that have been created since the nineties! But all this time and its 300 full-time professional editors allows the OED to provide lots of fact-checked information: all words in use in English since 1500 (and once a word gets added to the OED, it never leaves), the earliest citation for a word that they can find, its etymology and variant spellings, and notes on usage (e.g. archaic, slang, dialectal).
So you won’t find “blog” in the full OED (although it would be present in the concise versions, which are revised more frequently), but you can find 60 000 words describing all 430 uses of “set”.
On the other extreme, you have Urban Dictionary, which anyone can edit at any time, although more highly-voted entries are hopefully more reliable. The first definition of “set” in UD is “Gang, specifically a subsidiary gang.” Which you probably won’t find in the OED. But there are also definitions in UD that are completely invented, very local to a particular subdialect or friend group, or include quite a bit of the editor’s opinion. For example, the first definition of “blog”:
Short for weblog.
A meandering, blatantly uninteresting online diary that gives the author the illusion that people are interested in their stupid, pathetic life. Consists of such riveting entries as “homework sucks” and “I slept until noon today.”
So millions of people can edit Urban Dictionary whenever they encounter a new word (or Wiktionary/Wikipedia, although the latter two do require a lot more for sources), which means that it’s extremely up-to-date, but also subject to the whims of millions of people instead of professional editors.
The best dictionary would have all the new words and usages as soon as they were used by any significant portion of people, with accurate information about all their associated etymology and citations and other data. It’s hard to be both really trustworthy and really comprehensive, but it’s a question that the lexicographers that I met were taking very seriously in trying to figure out. At the moment, the best option is probably to use a different dictionary depending on what type of information you’re looking for. I’m glad to see that the courts are also thinking like this.
Former OED editor covertly deleted thousand of words, book claims
guardian.co.ukAn eminent former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary covertly deleted thousands of words because of their foreign origins and bizarrely blamed previous editors, according to claims in a book published this week.
Robert Burchfield’s efforts to rewrite the dictionary have been uncovered by Sarah Ogilvie, a linguist, lexicographer and former editor on the OED.
Ogilvie worked for 11 years to research and write Words of the World, published by Cambridge University Press, which challenges the widely held belief that editors of the OED between 1884 and 1933 were Anglocentric Oxford dons obsessed with preserving the Queen’s English, and that it was not until Robert Burchfield’s four supplements, produced between 1972 and 1986, that the dictionary was opened up to the wider world.
“I observed a pattern, that actually it was the earlier editors who were dealing with words in a really enlightened way. They certainly weren’t these Anglocentric, judging kind of editors – they were very sensitive to cultural differences and they seemed to be putting in a lot of foreign words and a lot of words from different varieties of English, which must have been amazing for that day when colonial varieties of English were just emerging,” said Ogilvie.
She undertook a detailed analysis of Burchfield’s supplement, comparing it with the 1933 supplement by Charles Onions and William Craigie. She found that, far from opening up the OED to foreign linguistic influences, Burchfield had deleted 17% of the “loanwords” and world English words that had been included by Onions, who included 45% more foreign words than Burchfield.
» via The Guardian
Dictionary compilers create endangered words list
guardian.co.ukguardian.co.uk, Sunday 21 August 2011 19.25 BST
Collins experts remove obsolete words – including aerodrome and wittol – from smaller dictionaries
What really tickles me about this article is the thought that in the future, text analysis tools like Google Trends will reveal a strange spike in the use of these obsolete words, thanks to this article and the comments on it.
OED Finds ‘OMG’ Usage From 1917
blogs.wsj.comI can think of only one proper response: LOL!
