It’s (Mostly Harmless) Drudgery If you know the word lexicographer, there’s a better-than-even chance you also know Samuel Johnson’s self-mocking definition of it: “a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.” We should probably set aside, at least for now, discussion of whether […]
Author Archive | Erin McKean
Guestblogging Dictionary Myths (Pt 3):
“That’s Not A Word!” One of the things that happens to you all the time when you’re a lexicographer is that people say something to you, something perfectly reasonable, such as “I am appalled by the current celebrification of journalists” and then stop themselves to ask you “Is that a word?” Considering that the is-it-a-word? […]
Guestblogging Dictionary Myths:
Part 2: The Myth of the Online Dictionary So (as several of you have asked in the comments, with varying levels of plaintiveness) why don’t dictionaries just go completely online, and include every word? There’d be none of this stupid in-or-out waffling on the part of the lexicographers; they could just muster the words in […]
Why Inartful Isn’t In
So yesterday Eugene asked me why the word inartful (meaning ‘unskillfully’) wasn’t in any dictionary that he’d consulted, including the OED and all the dictionaries you can search through onelook.com. He pointed out that this word has been used 600 times in 2007 alone, and that he’d found a cite going back to 1751, which […]
Guestblogging Dictionary Myths:
Part 1: The Myth of the Lexicographer-Judge What’s a dictionary myth? A dictionary myth is something that people believe about dictionaries (and words as they appear in dictionaries) that simply isn’t true. They can be semi-harmless dictionary urban legends (like the one that holds that antidisestablishmentarianism is the longest word in the dictionary) or they […]