John Simpson, editor-in-chief of the OED was on Radio 4's Today programme last Thursday ahead of a debate that evening entitled Who cares about English? (you can listen to the snippet during the last four minutes of the programme on iPlayer till next Thursday - here).
The OED certainly cares about English but it does not police it or lay down rules, as language academies do. Instead it monitors the language, writes definitions based on all available evidence, constantly updates and edits entries that have been in the dictionary for decades, and adds new words.
Evan Davis of Today asked John Simpson how common a word had to be before it was called an English word and entered the OED. Simpson said that 30 years ago or so they had a rule that a word went into the dictionary if it appeared five times over five years. However, with the advent of the internet, where any spelling permutation gets thousands of hits, the old system no longer applies. These days, said Simpson, they look at a range of corpora and databases and talk to specialists about words. Lexicographers at the OED will have been monitoring any examples of new language used during the Olympics (Davis mentioned the use of 'medal' as a verb - although that is not a new usage and is already in the OED).
Does anyone know where I can find information on the actual debate? I've tried to Google it, but couldn't find anything.
Thanks
Posted by: Pauline | October 04, 2012 at 07:41 AM
No, sorry, Pauline, I don't think the British Council has put anything on its website yet, although it has videos of other seminars, so maybe it will appear soon. See here:
http://englishagenda.britishcouncil.org/news/who-cares-about-english-panel-discussion
Also, here's the next seminar next week 'Who Needs Dictionaries?'
http://whoneedsdictionaries.eventbrite.com/?ebtv=C#
Posted by: Virtual Linguist | October 04, 2012 at 11:58 PM
Hi, thanks very much for your reply. I didn't get the email with your reply, but just checked back now. Apologies!
It's all very interesting! I might see if there's some sort of newsletter I can sign up to. Thanks once again. P :-)
Posted by: Pauline | October 11, 2012 at 09:06 PM