The virtual linguist

Volcano

The OED published its latest additions at the end of last month, and Chief Editor John Simpson highlights a group of 'volcano-related' words in an article on the OED site (here).

 

The earliest word in English that described what we now call a volcano was vulcan, first used with this sense in the early 15th century, but the word was known much earlier as the name of the Roman god of fire and metalworking. By the 17th century the word vulcan had also gained the meaning of metalworker or blacksmith, and also of cuckold, particularly where the husband in question was a blacksmith. Volcan started to be used in the late 16th century to mean a volcano, and volcano, itself, which by the 18th century had become the established spelling, entered English a few years later in the early 17th century. The words have their origin in Latin (the volcan spelling came from Spanish). As Simpson says in his article, it is not surprising that such mountains were given foreign names, since they are not English phenomena.

 

Vulcan has always been in the OED, but a new sense has gone within the last few weeks, namely the fictional alien race from Star Trek.

Collins Dictionary's words of 2012

Collins Dictionary has chosen twelve words of 2012, not just a single word of the year - there were too many new words in the language this year. Here they are:

January: Broga (yoga for men; you need to know, too, that 'bros' are men)

February: Legbomb (a word coined after Angelina Jolie wore a dress with a long slit up the side)

March: Eurogeddon (the worst-case scenario of the euro crisis)

April: Mummy porn (erotic fiction similar to Fifty Shades of Grey)

May: Zuckered (of Facebook shares, plummeted after the company's public offering)

June: Jubilympics (a blend of the Queen's jubilee, and the Olympics, both of which happened this year)

July: Romneyshambles (a series of gaffes, mainly related to the Olympics, made by Mitt Romney on a trip to London in 2012)

August: Games makers (staff and volunteers at the 2012 Olympics)

September: 47 per cent (another Romney gaffe, referring to the proportion of the population who live on benefits and pay no income tax)

October: Superstorm (a reference to Sandy)

November: Gangnam Style (the title of a song by South Korean Psy, whose video has to date had a billion hits on YouTube)

December: Fiscal cliff (tax increases and spending cuts)

 

Read more in this Guardian article. Collins Online Dictionary, with other suggestions received from members of the public for the words of the year, is here.

 

Preface to Johnson's Dictionary

Yesterday I was at Westminster Abbey to watch Professor David Crystal lay a wreath on Samuel Johnson's grave (Johnson died in December 1784) in a ceremony organised annually by the Johnson Society of London (with prayers and readings by a member of the Abbey's clergy). Professor Crystal later, after a large Christmas dinner in a nearby hotel, gave an after-dinner speech entitled "Did Johnson fix English spelling?"

 

Johnson himself used the words 'fix our language' in the Preface of his famous Dictionary (read an abridged version of the preface here). That was what his brief originally was, but, as the Preface makes clear, he soon realised the futility of such a task.

 

Professor Crystal said in his speech that Johnson did not fix English spellings and, indeed, one can see how spellings have changed since the mid-18th century in the Preface. See, for instance, just the final paragraph of the abridged Preface here. Johnson spelled words that we now end in -ic, in -ick. Examples in the paragraph include phlegmatick and publick, and the word excentrick, which has lost its x nowadays as well as the k.

 

Macmillan dictionaries to go digital

Macmillan has announced that from 2013 Macmillan dictionaries will only be available online (see this press release) - they will not be producing them as physical books any longer. Macmillan's research has shown that most people get their information via their computer, tablet or smartphone, which explains their decision.

 

Macmillan Dictionaries editor-in-chief Michael Rundell says in his blog that "The digital platform is the best platform for a dictionary" and "exiting print is a moment of liberation". He also says "But probably the biggest benefit of being online is that the dictionary is always up to date". Well, that would certainly be a good advantage if it were true, but, alas, it isn't. On 9 December 2010 I received a reply from a senior Macmillan employee in reply to a comment I had made saying that the Macmillan Online Dictionary definition for Inland Revenue (namely, "the government organization responsible for collecting taxes in the UK") was out of date. The government organization responsible for collecting taxes in the UK is actually called HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC for short) and has had that name since 2005, when Inland Revenue merged with HM Customs and Excise (as their website confirms). The Macmillan employee thanked me for my comment and said (I'm copying and pasting here) "yes, you're right. We need to update that entry. We should also check any other government department names". Well, they did not update the entry - it's 6 years out of date now - and I doubt that they checked other government department names.

Webster's Third

When Webster's Third Dictionary appeared in 1961, it caused an outcry. Some commentators described it using words such as permissive, perverse, calamity, shock, shabby and many other disparaging terms. It was a new type of dictionary for the US public. Webster's Second Dictionary of 1934 had been a prescriptive dictionary, giving readers advice on correct English, and omitting various 'undesirable' words (often those to do with sex); it had not differed that much from Noah Webster's original dictionary of 1828, on which it was based.

 

What incensed some people about Webster's Third was its inclusion of words considered 'bad English', such as ain't, even though the dictionary included a comment regarding usage: "... disapproved by many and more common in less educated speech, used orally in most parts of the United States by many cultivated speakers" (the commentators would have liked to believe that cultivated speakers did not say 'ain't').

 

Webster's Third was not an encyclopedic dictionary, as the Second was, which meant that people and places were not included as a matter of course. That led to the situation where God was the only entry in the dictionary (apart from initialisms) that was capitalised. Even the first person pronoun I appeared in lower case, i, followed by the label 'cap'. Apart from its descriptive ethos, it was criticised for some of its definitions for other reasons - verbosity in the case of this definition:

“a movable piece of a firm material or a structure supported usu. along one side and swinging on pivots or hinges, sliding along a groove, rolling up and down, revolving as one of four leaves, or folding like an accordion by means of which an opening may be closed or kept open for passage into or out of a building, room, or other covered enclosure or a car, airplane, elevator, or other vehicle.”

In case you haven't guessed, it is a door being defined here.

 

Most of the information in this post came from this Huffington Post article written by David Skinner, author of The Story of Ain't, which is worth a read.

OED updates September 2012

There are now 870,000 words and phrases as entries in the OED and there are well over 3 million illustrative quotations, according to a piece on the OED website by Chief Editor, John Simpson (available here to everyone, not just OED subscribers).

 

During the last quarter entries between 'affable' and 'always' have been looked at and updated if they needed to be. This group of words was originally in the very first volume of the OED to be published in 1884, before James Murray, the then editor, got fully into his stride, and hasn't been updated since, so the OED lexicographers certainly have had their work cut out over the last three months.

 

Around 90% of the words in this group - many of the words that begin al- -- mention Arabic in their etymology, and over 50 mention Spanish.

 

The verb 'allow' was in the group edited over the last quarter. It has 23 subsenses, including an early meaning - to praise (allow is derived from Latin laudare, to praise).

 

Atishoo has been in the OED since 1933, but achoo has just gone in with the same meaning (sound of a sneeze); it is also spelled occasionally as aitchoo, achew, ahchew, ahschoo, ahshoo, ahchoo, atchoo, aitshoo. Despite only just going in to the Dictionary, the first citation is from 1843.

 

Other new entries this month include:

afizz: in a fizz
aflap: worried, agitated
a-flying: in flight
Afro-Saxon: a person of African descent who identifies closely with English or Anglo-American culture and values
agarbatti: an incense stick
aggressee: a person, nation, etc. towards whom or which aggression is directed
aginer: a person who is against something
agrochemistry: = agricultural chemistry (which was previously in the Dictionary at the 'agricultural' entry)
ahistoricism: a lack of regard for history
akkadogram: a cuneiform character of the Akkadian language
alakazam: a magic word said when performing a trick
alcoholiday: a holiday or period of leisure spent drinking alcohol
alderperson: non-sexist substitute for alderman or alderwoman
Alf Garnett: a man resembling Alf Garnett (from the sitcom) in behaviour or outlook
algorithmics: the study or use of algorithms
all fives: on hands, knees and buttocks (cf all fours)
all righty: all right

Just because a word has gone into the OED for the first time in the year 2012 does not mean that it is a new word. Again-chare has entered the Dictionary this quarter, but it was a word used pre-1066. Again-going has just gone in, but has been tagged as 'obsolete'; it means 'the action of going to meet someone'.

 

You can see all the new entries here.

Misogyny definition

The Australian Macquarie Dictionary has pledged to update its definition of 'misogyny' after a speech by the Australian prime minister Julia Gillard, in which she accused another politician of being a misogynist (see this BBC piece).

 

The Macquarie Dictionary is running behind the OED in this respect: Macquarie's current definition of misogyny is 'hatred of women' but editors say they will add the definition 'entrenched prejudice against women' in its next edition. The definition in the OED is 'Hatred or dislike of, or prejudice against women'. This definition dates back to 2002, when the definition was updated from the previous 'Hatred of women'. Collins has 'hatred of women' and the single-volume Oxford Dictionary of English has 'the hatred of women by men'. Chambers Dictionary, quirky as ever, doesn't define it at all; it appears under the entry for miso-, along with the words misoclere (hating the clergy) and misology (hating of reason or knowledge), which are defined. A misogynist is, however, defined -- as 'a woman-hater'.

 

The miso- prefix is from the Greek for 'hate'. The OED tells us that it was rare for English to form words with this prefix after the 19th century, although Italian and French were still coining new words beginning miso- after English had more or less given up.

 

Some people might say that the definition of a word should be linked to its etymology, but that is not the case with many other English words whose meanings have parted company with the original etymon. See the blog post immediately after this one.

Dictionary Day

Today is National Dictionary Day in the US. The date was chosen because it was the birthday of the great American lexicographer Noah Webster, who was born on 16 October 1758, three years after the publication of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary in England.

 

Webster was originally a schoolteacher, who wrote a phenomenally successful spelling book - by 1869 80 million copies had been sold. His primary interest was to promote a specifically American English and it is Webster who is responsible for the American spellings -or, as opposed to -our (as in color/colour), -k instead of the French -que (check/cheque, masque/mask) and -er instead of the French-influenced -re (center/centre, theater/theatre). He dropped the k from English words such as musick and magick (British English dropped it later, too) and offered wimman and wimmen as alternative spellings of woman and women. His great work, the American Dictionary of the English Language, was published in 1828.

 

There's not much in the British press today about Dictionary Day, but here's one article from The Independent newspaper.

Blue-arsed fly and OED appeals

The OED relies on the general public to help in its search for early examples of words in print. It feeds billions of words of text into its computers to form its corpus, but the text tend to come from large or well-known publications, and it misses examples in the trade press, advertising literature, private letters and so on.

 

Here is the OED's latest appeals page. One of the items being discussed is 'blue-arsed fly'. At the moment, the first usage in the Dictionary is from a Times article of 1970, and it was the Duke of Edinburgh who said it. However, blue-assed fly (without an r) is first attested in 1932, and the Dictionary thinks that the large gap between the two versions is unlikely. They are therefore looking for earlier examples of 'blue-arsed fly' than 1970.

 

The Daily Mail picked up on this story, and has expanded on it here. Lots of commentators say they remember the word from the 1940s or 50s, or from their granny. However, this isn't sufficient for the OED. They want written evidence.

Who cares about English?

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).