Browse Items (3710 total)

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53613031975_96269bfe59_b.jpg
Lexicographic modernity begins with Philip Babcock Gove (1902–1972), named chief editor at Merriam after William Allan Neilson’s death in 1946. Gove brought the latest thinking in linguistics to bear on practical lexicography, including one principle…

Tags:

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53612580586_a72b1d66c4_b.jpg
The undisputed master of slang today is Jonathon Green, whose magnum opus, Green’s Dictionary of Slang, was 17 years in the making. It contains 110,000 headwords supported by 415,000 quotations spread out over 6,200 pages. It’s the fullest scholarly…

Tags:

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53612790488_eaee45cba4_b.jpg
Although British regionalisms were documented beginning in the Victorian era, America had to wait until the late 20th century. Frederic G. Cassidy, a Jamaican-born linguist, sent 500 lexicographic allies armed with questionnaires and tape recorders…

Tags:

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53612790588_0024991667_b.jpg
If A Feminist Dictionary doesn’t look much like other dictionaries, that’s because it’s an avowed polemic rather than a work of practical lexicography. Professors Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler produced what one archivist called “sort of a cross…

Tags:

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53611711647_f7de8516e7_b.jpg
Computer enthusiasts have long constituted a subculture, but nobody thought to record their distinctive language until Raphael Finkel, a doctoral student, began collecting it in a text file nicknamed “The Jargon File.” As he shared it with friends…

Tags:

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53612923609_80c4b9839f_b.jpg
Publishing a candid “dictionary of homophile cant” in 1972 took courage. Just three years since the Stonewall uprising, homosexuality was still classed as “sexual deviation” and was illegal in 46 of the 50 states. But Bruce Rodgers was convinced that…

Tags:

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53611711702_2553e19e8d_b.jpg
Linguists began to take African American speech seriously in the early 20th century, but it took until 1970 to get a book-length dictionary. Poet and novelist Clarence Major took many words from jazz (offbeat). Some are joyous (hot dog!) and some…

Tags:

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53613032495_1789476492_b.jpg
Bandleader Cab Calloway integrated “jive” into his sets at Harlem’s legendary Cotton Club, one of the few places where white audiences could hear Black music in the 1930s. As “Professor Cab Calloway,” he facetiously lectured delighted audiences by…

Tags:

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53612582106_57acd292d9_b.jpg
While working on his Dictionary of Catchphrases, Partridge turned to informants for assistance, including amateur lexicographer Joseph Shipley. This list of queries from 1975 is typical. When Partridge tried to make sense of say uncle, Shipley…

Tags:

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53612791128_e80f1e0b15_b.jpg
After a decade of “close observation of colloquial speech,” Eric Partridge issued the 20th century’s most popular slang dictionary, which went through many editions. In early editions he treated “unpleasant terms . . . aseptically”—meaning that…

Tags:

Output Formats

atom, dcmes-xml, json, omeka-xml, rss2