4 June 2011
It only took ninety years. The project began in 1921 and is just being wrapped up now. The Associated Press has a story, and the project’s website is here.
(Tip o’ the hat: Jon Lighter on ADS-L)
Spelling Weirdness at the OED
3 June 2011
I just found an odd entry. It’s nothing big, just an oddity that I want to point out. While searching the OED for something else, I was offered a cross-reference to the term riot girl. Curious, I clicked on it. I found out that a riot girl was a member or follower of one of the many female rock bands that flourished in the 1990s. Fine enough, a neat little bit of social history. But then I noticed the citations. In every single one, the term is spelled riot grrrl or riot grrl. Yet the dictionary’s head word uses the conventional spelling girl. Did the OED simply regularize the spelling for the headword?
But the dictionary does have a separate entry for grrrl to accommodate this spelling variation. Why have a separate entry for this, and not include it as a variant sense and spelling under the main headword for girl, yet standardize the spelling for riot girl? Given that this is online, it’s easy enough to allow the search function to point those who spell it riot girl to the right entry. Both entries were in the batch that was published in December 2001, so they went through editorial review at roughly the same time (and perhaps were even written by the same person). What’s going on here? Is this an oversight, or is there some arcane editorial standard at work here?
(I haven’t included links to the entries because I’m not sure how to generate a generic link to the OED anymore. The links that I use all go through the University of Toronto servers and are useless to anyone not using the U of T system. If anyone knows the correct URL syntax for a generic OED entry, please let me know by email or in the discussion forums. In any case, it’s easy enough to find these entries using the dictionary’s search function.)
[Edit: corrected spelling error, 13 June]
Profanity at the New Yorker
31 May 2011
A neat historical summary of when “dirty” words first appeared in the pages of that august magazine. Who would have guessed that Calvin Trillin would have been the first to write the word fuck in The New Yorker.
[Hat tip to Jesse Sheidlower’s Twitter feed]
People Being Stupid About Shakespeare
30 May 2011
Holger Syme holds forth on some silly things said by Simon Schama in the Guardian.
(Hat tip: Chris Pugh’s twitter feed. Note: Syme is a professor here at the University of Toronto, but don’t know him.)
Noah Webster Bio
29 May 2011
Jesse Sheidlower has a review of Joshua Kendall’s The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster’s Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture in the New York Times.
