Updating the Dictionary
LEKACHMAN, ROBERT
Writers & Writing UPDATING THE DICTIONARY BY ROBERT LEKACHMAN In 1933 when the 13 volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary, subtitled A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, appeared,...
...As the editor summarizes his achievement, this volume "contains about 18,750Main Words divided into some 28,000 senses...
...They take a harsher view of Webster's Third (1966) for reasons represented in this expression of a new strategy: "In conformity with the principle that a definition, to be adequate, must be written only after an analysis of usage, the definitions in this edition are based chiefly on examples of usage collected since publication of the preceding edition...
...To this day, upholders of standards venerate Webster's Second...
...For one thing, people as early as 1900 in England were as guilty as 1983 U.S...
...Let us examine next "pickaninny" : "The term now often gives offense when applied to children by people of European extraction...
...Should dictionaries prescribe correct usages and pronunciations according to the criteria of the educated, or should they simply go with the flow and describe current usage without flattering or invidious comment...
...Only "often...
...Even in philology, there are those who wistfully seek compromise . The editors of the 1966 Random House Dictionary of the English Language waved a banner of moderation: "Should the dictionary be an authoritarian guide to 'correct ' English or should it be so antiseptically free of comment that it may defeat the user by providing him with no guidance at all...
...The editors do take a somewhat noncommittal view of usage in the colonies...
...One small legacy of these great debates is that here and there in the present volume I have found myself adding my own opinions about the acceptability of certain words or meanings in educated use...
...The third meaning wounds me deeply...
...Eliza was fed up with Professor Higgins, though, not with dictionaries...
...Consider "pink": "A person whose politics are left of center, but closer to the center than those of a 'red...
...Piss in a person's pocket," for example, is noted without further comment as Australian and a pleasant 1969 example offered: "I don't mean to piss in yer pockets, but youse blokes are all right...
...Many new uses and meanings are supplied for words already recorded in 1933...
...Burchfield, Oxford, 1,579 pp., $125.00) includes words borrowed from other languages, among them Chinese and Yiddish, invented words like "parp" and "scripophily," fresh compounds like "chairperson," and "controversial" words like "pickaninny," and "Scientology...
...Prescriptive and canonical definitions have not been taken over nor have recommendations been followed unless confirmed by independent investigation of usage borne out by genuine citations...
...and some 4,500 undefined Combinations...
...I am not sure how to grade the OED on the delicate protocol of the honorific "peer," whose fourth meaning is, "Now also a man elevated to the peerage on anon-hereditary basis...
...I look forward to Volume 4 of the supplements, which will complete, for the time being, a mighty task...
...In general the OED does much better with English as it is used outside the British Isles than American rivals do with English usage in places other than North America...
...The acid test, I suppose, is the four-letter word for intercourse...
...Are all words used by any group, including the most specialized, really to be recorded...
...The OED treads carefully but not always satisfactorily in the realms of politics, race and sex...
...Now lavatories are discreetly marked 'Peers' and 'Women Peers.'" As I may just possibly have intimated, I find the OED irresistible browsing, and although from time to time I have sympathized with the prescriptivists, I admire the breadth of tolerance that allows "loose use" to suffice as judgment on the pervasive use of "disinterested" as synonymous with "uninterested...
...I'm so sick of words...
...Lexicographers face among their other problems appropriate treatment of four-letter Anglo-Saxon words familiar to all but very young children...
...Like its predecessors, A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, Volume 3, O-Sez (edited by R.W...
...By the way, if you want to put the OED to such prosaic uses as pinning down exact denotations, spellings, and pronunciations, the editors will oblige you completely...
...I come finally to Burchfield's explanation of his own stance expressed in the music of an opinionated, human voice: "Expressions like right on and hopefully bring out the worst and the best in men and women...
...Slang terms and slang meanings of standard words have been entered only when there is evidence that the slang term has been in use for a considerable length of time, and when it has been used in a printed work which is likely to continue being read...
...Since language is a social institution, the lexicographer must give the user an adequate indication of the attitudes of society toward particular words or expressions, whether he regards these attitudes as linguistically sound or not...
...Such are the issues that agitate word fanciers and such also are controversies among lexicographers...
...If you are tempted to fulminate against them...
...a liberal socialist...
...Shit" is excluded from Webster's Second but recorded in the 1933 OED, albeit with a sniff: "Not now in decent use...
...For those addicted to the latter, the OED has always conferred special pleasures because it keeps its chronological promises...
...The editors of Webster's Second Unabridged (1934) spoke as follows: "Both Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster conceived it to be a duty of the dictionary editor to maintain the purity of the standard language...
...The lexicographer who does not recognize the existence of long-established strictures in usage has not discharged his full responsibility...
...Both Websters and Random shrink from inserting such scatology into the company of respectable words...
...There is...
...TV anchorpersons...
...The OED is rather more relaxed than are American dictionaries...
...Language...
...The adjective "unabridged" suggests considerable hubris in any philological claimant...
...Volume 1 of the OED supplements (1972) not only handles this without tongs but offers citations dating from 1680...
...Writers & Writing UPDATING THE DICTIONARY BY ROBERT LEKACHMAN In 1933 when the 13 volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary, subtitled A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, appeared, acclaim was universal...
...The illustrative quotations are estimated to number 142,500...
...It is, therefore, the function of a dictionary to provide the user with an exact record of the language he sees and hears...
...Since keeping up with linguistic change is a perpetual rear-guard campaign, OED editors began issuing substantial supplementary volumes in 1972, with the third of a projected four now out...
...It is instructive to compare and contrast their manifestoes...
...bear in mind that the English language has been in the hands of linguistic conservatives and linguistic radicals for more than a thousand years and that, far from bleeding to death from past crudities and past wounds, it can be used with majesty and power, free of all fault, by our greatest writers...
...These and other elements lying strewn in the disputed territory of our language are at any given time not numerous but are charged with a significance that goes far beyond the mere linguistic...
...He does not need to express approval or disapproval of a disputed usage, but he does need to report the milieu of words as well as their meanings...
...There are about 8,500 defined Combinations...
...Still, Burchfield et al do better than Webster's Third's "a Negro child," and no worse than Random's "usually offensive...
...a linguistically sound middle course...
...In other words, the editors were as prescriptive as they dared to be and willing into the bargain to make ex cathedra predictions of literary longevity...
...However, with the growth in literacy of the past century, and the increase in fiction, in drama, in radio and motion pictures, of the use of dialect, slang, and colloquial speech, it has become necessary for a general dictionary to record and interpret the vocabularies of geographical and occupational dialects, and of the livelier levels of the speech of the educated...
...They stand as emblems of social and political division within our society...
...The original 13-volume edition contained a multitude of historical citations...
...The first citation, dated 1925, is taken from The Negro and His Songs: "Railroad Bill was a mighty sport, Shot all buttons off the high sheriffs coat, Den hollered, 'Right on, Desperado Bill!'" The last illustration comes from the British Daily Telegraph at the end of 1979: "A correspondent remarked: 'You don't portray any crisis feeling.' The President replied: 'Right on.'" When the OED discovers transatlantic examples of a term as early as 1925, Webster's Third and Random must be judged delinquent in missing it as late as 1966...
...It's almost enough to recall Eliza Doolittle's lament to Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady, "Words, Words, Words...
...That record must be fully [Italics in original] descriptive...
...Also-Peeress in her own right...
...is never staticexcept when dead...
...Users of the dictionary may or may not find these editorial comments diverting: they have been added (adapting a statement by John Ray in 1691) 'as oil to preserve mucilage from inspissation.'" No surprise then to find "right on" defined as "used as an expression of enthusiastic agreement, approval, or encouragement," with no derogatory label attached...
...However, for some reason, "pissed" merits "slang" as an attribution, and "puke," evidently a touch more offensive, is termed "coarse...
...The supplements add examples which commence, as in the parent, with Chaucer and end with snippets, dated as late as 1981, from recent thrillers and trashy novels...
...Or consider "piss," which is labeled "vulgar" in Webster's Second and Random yet "usually considered vulgar" in Webster's Third...
...The strategy is ecumenical...
...Always, of course, issues of taste obtrude...
...The difficulty is neatly encapsulated in the 1974 Observer citation provided: "We are very passionate that we are not peeresses: peeresses are the wives of peers...
...The OED supplement refrains from the adjective even in compounds like "piss-head...
...a radical...
Vol. 66 • April 1983 • No. 7
