Words of the World: A Global History of the Oxford English Dictionary

Posted on February 19, 2013 by Ed Battistella
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Sarah Ogilvie’s Words of the World: A Global History of the Oxford English Dictionary begins by describing her entry into the quiet world of the OED. She had come from of Australian branch of Oxford dictionaries, was a rare linguist among lexicographers, and quickly found herself fascinated by the OED archives, where she discovered some interesting facts about the OED editors. The early editors were not quite so fusty as many thought.

The question she focused on was this: how did the OED editors treat borrowed words? The simplified story that is often told is that the OED went from a tool of British empire-building to a repository of the world’s Englishes, evolving to preserve the flexibility and utility of English. It turns out that that story of progress is too simple. The early editors, especially Murray, Furnivall, and Onions, and were quite open to loan words (they essentially treated words used in an English context as English). And Robert Burchfield, editor of the OED supplement published in 1986, was not as inclusive as the reputation he cultivated. (In another context, John Updike has once referred to him as pleading the case of outcast words “like a left-wing lawyer”). Comparing the 1986 supplement to the 1933 supplement, Ogilvie found that the later supplement omitted many loanwords rather than marking them with as obsolete (with a dagger, naturally).

Was Burchfield making editorial choices (the words after all were still in the OED1) or lexicographic purging? It’s an open question but the press has sensationalized the story a bit, and Burchfield does seem to have overly hyped his own role. But, as Ogilvie makes clear, the story is really about the foresight of the early editors in deciding what a historical dictionary should do and how it should reach out to the English- speaking world.

Words of the World: A Global History of the Oxford English Dictionary is scholarly but readable and certainly changed the way I think of the OED.

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The Story of Ain’t

Posted on February 17, 2013 by Ed Battistella
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David Skinner’s The Story of Ain’t ain’t just about ain’t. It’s the tale of the making of Webster’s Third International Dictionary, the wonderfully controversial flashpoint in the cultural wars between realists and snoots. I wondered what Skinner would add to the well-known (at least by linguists) story of Philip Gove and the cultural battle over scientific lexicography and to the tale told by Herbert Morton’s The Story of Webster’s Third: Philip Gove’s Controversial Dictionary and Its Critics.

Quote a lot, it turns out. Skinner tells the stories of the dictionary and the linguistic and business issues that informed its creation—the use of the IPA, the process outlined in Gove’s Black Book of dictionary-marking, the work-day at the Merriam-Webster office in Springfield (no talking), the initial public relations blunder about ain’t (it said “ain’t gets official recognition at last,” setting Webster’s III up to be about permissiveness rather than progress). Skinner describes the attempted buy-out by the American Heritage publishing company. And he tells the stories of not just Philip Gove and Dwight Macdonald but the presidents of Merriam and American Heritage (Gordon Gallan and James Parton), and the linguists and critics of the day (Leonard Bloomfield, Charles Fries, Sterling Leonard, James Sledd, Bergen Evans, and more). H. L. Mencken and David Foster Wallace even make appearances.

Skinner treats Gove and linguists of the day fairly, explaining their thinking and hinting at the difficulty of their position: describing the realities of language in a society that often wanted rules not facts. The detail research and explorations of the lives of the principals made this a compelling intellectual drama, and a tale with a moral, but not the one you might think.

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MY YEAR OF NEW WORDS, PART 5: SUFFIXES

Posted on February 15, 2013 by Ed Battistella
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Making up words requires suffixes—word endings. In English, there are two major types of suffixes. Some endings INFLECT nouns, verbs and adjectives, and adverbs to show their grammatical forms: plural, possessive, past tense, comparative, superlative. And some endings DERIVE new words from old, like –ify which makes a verb out of a noun or –ness which makes a noun out of an adjective or –y, which makes an adjective out of a noun (and which got quite a workout in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series). As with prefixes, there are traffic rules. You can add –ness to clever, happy and sad but not intelligent, depressed and ecstatic. And we say curiousity or curiousness but verbosity rather than verboseness.

One suffix that’s puzzles me is –er. The vast majority of –er words are added to verbs to make them into one who ___s: teacher, farmer, professor (with the erudite variant –or). Lots of exceptions exist that involve implied or outright metaphor: lifer, looker, officer, lawyer, mother f***er. The –er words that are especially confusing to me are the words truther, birther, deather. And there’s a set of double –er compounds too: fixer upper, picker upper (check out early November for my attempt to add to this with breaker downer). I should have tried looker overer for the triple –er hat trick.

Some languages, by the way, use circumfixes and infixes too. English has a causative circumfixed em—–en, as in embolden or Homer Simpson’s embiggen. But we don’t use that technique much. And we have infixes for expressive purposes in polysyllables: like mathe-freakin-matics, or responsi-freakin-bitity.

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MY YEAR OF NEW WORDS, PART 4: PREFIXES

Posted on February 12, 2013 by Ed Battistella
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March was about prefixes. The un- of uncool, unknowable, unpredicatable, unintelligible, uninhabited, and so forth. Attached to adjectives, un- means not. It also means not when attached to nouns, like undead, uncola, and the great unwashed. But attached to verbs, un- means to reverse the effect of: to undo, untie, unfasten, unbutton. So there are rules for prefixes that are sensitive to the part of speech of the root word.

The same goes for ex-. You can have an ex-spouse or ex-friend or ex-president or be an ex-student or ex-employee. But you can’t ex-marry or ex-friend or ex-employ. Ex- goes with nouns but verbs. There is a grammar to prefixes (all fixes, really) and we call this grammar morphology.

Prefixes can be ambiguous just as words can. Take in-, for example. Semantically in- is sometimes like un- or ex- in words like indescribable, intangible, indefensible, infallible, incredible, inevitable, inept, inability (which is the noun form of unable, oddly). It means not. Of course, sometimes the in- changes its sound shape to homophonize with a following consonant: impossible, improbable, irregular, illegal, but that’s another story.

Sometimes in- just means in. As in indent, income, immigrant, and impediment. This brings us to the words ingratiate and ingrate, two unrelated words that sound like they should be related but aren’t. In ingratiate, you are trying to get in the good graces of someone. But if you are an ingrate, you are ungrateful (there that in-/un- switch again). And so course, this is why words like inflammable as confusing.

Is it not flammable or is it able to burst into flame? Words have an internal structure and if you correctly interpret inflammable as able to burst into flames you are treating the [inflame] as one part and able as added to that: [[inflame] able] if you adopt the other meaning you are putting flame and able together first, then adding in: [in[flammable]]. It’s a natural enough thing to do.

One of my students, by the way, suggested—in jest, I think—that implode meant not explode. It’s an unimpossible analysis, I think. I suppose that infallible could also mean able to fall into. Hmm.

Returning to the realm of the unimpossible, the same ambiguity arises with un- and –able. Things can be undoable, untieable, unbuttonable, and unzippable—able to be undone or not able to be done, etcetera. Not all prefixes mean not, by the way. But a lot do: a- and an-, un-, in-, de-, ex-.

Before we leave prefixes, I should point out the word defixes, that I introduced to refer to prefixes (or suffixes) that get promoted to words, like ex, bi, ism, and ish. A student suggested ishness, which uses the promoted prefix ish as the root. And this can work the other way too: words can be pressed into service as affixes (more next time).

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