Dictionary update ahoy!

I always think of dictionaries as like a huge, slow-moving (but graceful) sea creature, a sort of enormous beast like the avanc in Mieville's The Scar, making inexorable steady progress. Lexicographers probably feel very nimble and agile, skipping through language and keeping abreast of linguistic change as it eddies around them and I'm doing them a terrible disservice. 

Print dictionaries, of course, are hopelessly out of date before they're even published. Online dictionaries can include much more recent usage, though they still tend to be a few years behind what we think of as current, because they need to include general usage with evidence, not just Jay from down the road's definition of a word. 

Dictionary.com published an article about its latest update, with a very thorough overhaul of its entries, including adding #MeToo and af. It's also updated the language in some of its older entries too, though. For instance, it capitalises Black now when referring to Black people/culture, following style guides including AP in doing so. It has also separated out the entries for the word more generally (e.g. the colour) and when it refers to people: 

In the dictionary world, separating the people-related definitions of Black from the other definitions of black is a major—and extremely rare—move. As a rule, different senses of words that share an origin, as lowercase black and uppercase Black historically do, are included under the same entry. It’s a rule worth breaking. Dictionaries are not merely a linguistic exercise or academic enterprise. What are the effects of Black, referring to human beings, being grouped together with black, which can mean, among other things, “wicked”? The effects are social. They are psychological. They are personal. How words are entered into the dictionary—especially words concerning our personal identities—have real effects on real people in the real world.

It's also  reworded the entries referring to gay or gayness to remove the term homosexuality (they now use gay sexual orientation instead). They note that homosexuality now has connotations of 'pathology, mental illness, and criminality'. Whether it always has done, I don't know - one can check these things using concordances and corpora. But this is an interesting case of specialisation, where the term gay has become the default term, and so the use of another term carries some extra layer of meaning and now those connotations are very strong and the word is no longer (if it ever was) neutral. It's a technical-sounding, scientific word, so it makes sense that it would be used for technical things like medical or legal contexts. 

Take a look at the whole article. It's really worth reading, and it includes this list of words that they consider to be late-2010s-defining:

amirite
battle royale
contouring
dead white male
DGAF
Dunning-Kruger effect
empty suit
gender reveal
GOAT
hodophobia
ish
information bubble
jabroni
janky
MAGA
MeToo
nothingburger
swole
world-building
zhuzh

Antidisestablishmentarianism is a very long word

There's a really great post at Merriam-Webster about why the word antidisestablishmentarianism isn't in the dictionary. Basically, it's because it isn't a word in common usage. This raises interesting questions about the nature of lexicography, what 'in common usage' means, meta-linguistic mention vs. use, and compositionality of meaning.

The word clearly does have a meaning. Merriam-Webster say it's this:

opposition to depriving a legally established state church of its status

I thought it was something like the movement against the separation of church and state, but maybe that's the same thing - I'm not at all clear about what that actually means. But the point is that the meaning arises directly as a sum of its parts: it's compositional. Well, this isn't strictly true: there is some idiomatic meaning to do with the church and the law as well. But the length of it comes from attaching affixes with strictly compositional meanings. When you have compositionality, you can theoretically create longer and longer words, up to the limit of your cognitive capacity. I could add a morpheme and create antidisestablishmentarianismation, for instance. Some long words in quite common use aren't in the dictionary simply because they're made by standard suffixation processes, and that suffix is in the dictionary so you can work out the meaning for yourself.

So antidisestablishmentariansim is a real word, in the sense that people recognise it and can understand its meaning and it's made with proper word-formation processes. But for M-W, it's not a word in common usage. They have only three quotations for this word which use the meaning they give above, and dictionaries rely on written uses of words. This is why they can seem slow: words only get in when they've achieved plenty of use in print materials.

They do have plenty of quotations of the word with reference to it being a long word, however. It is in the OED, and their quotations refer to this:

1984   T. Augarde Oxf. Guide Word Games xxvi. 216   The longest words that most people know are antidisestablishmentarianism..and supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

This is metalinguistic mention of the word, not an actual use of the word. We're stepping outside language and talking about the word itself, not using the word to say something. This is sort of difficult to get your head round because we have to use language to talk about language, a long-recognised philosophical problem in linguistics.

Interestingly, M-W say at the end of their piece that it might be considered a viable entry 'simply because it's a well-known word'. The meaning is not well-known, however, so it would be an entry whose definition read something like 'famous long word', and the definition as a secondary bit of information. That would be quite cool and very meta.

Irrelevant postscript: There's a really stupid joke that goes like this: 'Antidisestablishmentarianism is a very long word. How do you spell it?' and the answer is, of course, 'I, T'. I sometimes try that out on my students and some of them groan but a lot of them simply don't understand the joke. Maybe it's the way I tell 'em. 

A @name

Twitter has a search bar thing and in it, it says "enter a @name or username". Now, I've been pronouncing @name as "at name", because that to me is an "at sign". I don't know if twitter is calling it something else. That's what the article "a" rather than "an" suggests. But what could it be calling it?

In other languages, it's called things like "monkey tail", "elephant's trunk", "little dog", "snail" and other animal-based names reflecting its shape. But in English it's really only called the "at sign".

So twitter, why you no obey phonological rules?

Spoffles, flanges and pobbling

Words get into the language in lots of funny ways. Most of them have been there so long we don't know, or we just know that we brought them with us when we left Germany. Lots of them were borrowed, from Latin and French in the case of English. Lots of words we make ourselves, with our word-making tools like suffixes (brightness) and compounding (carwash). My favourite type of words are the ones that someone makes up, and they catch on.

Quiz was supposedly an early example of this, when (according to anecdote) a Dublin man had a bet that he could introduce a new word into the language. Sadly, as with so many such anecdotes, it's probably bunk, as it was in use already by the alleged time of this bet. Still, there are some words that we know were invented this way, as the people who did it either did so on film or are around to tell us.

Spoffle, quite apart from being a great word, is a useful one, if you ever have anything to do with microphones, as I sometimes do. It's this thing, in front of Stephen Fry:

Source: http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/topic/fry-a-day/page/759

It's the foamy cover for a mic that prevents 'popping' and cuts down wind noise. Essential item, apparently unnamed (people seem to use the very dull microphone cover) until Hugh Laurie called it a spoffle (in Stephen Fry's hearing, which is partly why he's in the photo above). This is what I always call it, and lots of others do too. At my old job it was the common name for such things. But, astonishingly, it's not in the OED and it doesn't have a Wikipedia article. Apparently it used to but it was deleted, and now it's not even mentioned in the section on microphone covers.

Another word that came out of British comedy is the collective noun for baboons, a flange, and for gorillas, a whoop. Flange has caught on remarkably well and, although it too doesn't get into the OED (they're so cautious, those lexicographers) it's used by people, including (allegedly) academics (although I have not read the papers or books in which it's used). Here's the sketch, with Mel Smith and Rowan Atkinson talking to Pamela Stephenson:

Literature has been a source of some good words. Lewis Carroll invented the word chortle as a blend of chuckle and snort, although not many of his more creative efforts from the Jabberwocky have caught on. This OED blog post talks about Edward Lear, who made up a lot of words (runcible spoon being a particularly well-known example) and also used obscure real words. It has a charming anecdote about the blog-writer's doctor friend who was certain that pobble meant 'to amputate toes', until the blog-writer introduced her to the rhyme The pobble who has no toes. Pobble's Bay also seems to be a place in Wales, which does rather remind one of The meaning of Liff by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd (who created QI, presented by Stephen Fry - we have come full circle so it's time to stop waffling).