The only occasionally nefarious dictionary editor

Ben Zimmer, a guest author featured in Far from the Madding Gerund, writes a piece in today's New York Times that reminds us dictionary making is slow, methodical, scholarly work, and not produced by "cloak-and-dagger cabals full of deep, dark secrets." Ben tells us:

As an informal (and unpaid) consultant for the O.E.D. for the past several years, I had to chuckle at the breathless reporting. The O.E.D. has long kept filing cabinets full of citation slips for words under consideration, though nowadays the work is mostly done online. There is nothing surreptitious about it — it’s all part of the mundane work that lexicographers do to keep track of how words and phrases develop over time, in order to shape and revise their entries. If you saw how dictionary editors actually went about their day, you’d quickly understand why Samuel Johnson famously defined “lexicographer” as “a harmless drudge.” 

Ben's piece is great (as usual for him), but something I originally learned from Nathan Bierma is actually pretty scandalous: There is a tradition of making up entries while producing encyclopedias and dictionaries. The reason for it is to trap would-be copyright thieves; that is, you know someone stole from you if the information they are passing off as their own has only one single (false) source, and that source is your encyclopedia or your dictionary. You can learn all about it by searching on the word esquivalience. The New Yorker wrote up one famous example of the fountain designer Lillian Virginia Mountweazel.

Nathan Bierma featured at Visual Thesaurus

The great Visual Thesaurus has a feature from Nathan Bierma's The Eclectic Encyclopedia of English today. Go there to find out what is the most dastardly puncuation mark in English. If you want to learn the meaning of presticogitation and esquivalience, however, you may need to check out the whole book.

Nathan Bierma hits the streets (again)

Neal Whitman has weighed in on Nathan Bierma's new collection of material culled from the "On Language" column of the Chicago Tribune. Yes, the column is no longer a regular feature in the paper, but Neal points out that like the great DVD box set, The Eclectic Encyclopedia of English lets the series live on.

Neal takes exception with the logic of calling the book an "encyclopedia" and the alphabetical arrangement, but such is the challenge of the anthologizing such material. There is no perfect configuration; every solution has built-in compromises. In the end, Neal does come through with an understanding of what the book really does: "It’s fast, easy, entertaining reading, and would be a good gift for people who like reading about language . . . not so much a reference book as a language lover’s bathroom reader."

But Neal, "encyclopedia" sounds so much loftier than "bathroom reader"; we couldn't resist.