So, the OED was democratized, the terms on which it conferred status altered in the trade book marketplace. Many—probably not all—people who owned the big dictionaries back in used them to look up words, even if they also used them to stop doors, boost the short leg at the dinner table, or impress visitors. But how much of what they looked up could be found more easily in a college dictionary?
Some wanted to be prepared for the rare rare word, for which only the unabridged dictionary could provide an adequate explanation. The commodification of dictionaries was not new in or even in the second half of the twentieth century. If a good-looking dictionary makes you look good, why not buy it? Modern dictionary makers once colluded with dictionary owners in satisfying that impulse. In the Information Age, dictionaries have been reduced to their information.
You will find fewer big print dictionaries open on cherry book stands in American living rooms. Will people of the word—people who love language, but nevertheless consult online dictionaries—figure out ways to display their wordiness in worldly ways, establishing public identities like those that dictionaries helped establish in the previous century? Imagine walking into a large, sunlit room of ultramodern design, a room designed like an iPhone.
At one end, you see a screen on a stand. You walk up to it and note several icons, all of which lead to dictionaries. Montgomery and Joseph S. This lady knows her language. The display materializes the immaterial dictionary texts and it associates its owner—its producer—with lexical learning and the cultural information embedded in quotations dictionaries. Also, given the production values, it aligns knowledge and style in the same way that leather or pigskin bindings once did.
You approach the altar of lexical knowledge. What is this Hobson-Jobson thing? A sort of skirt or kilt of white calico, worn by Singhalese of both sexes, much in the same way as the Malay Sarong. Consider it another graduation present, she says. You may be the only person in your residence hall to own a deluxe copy of Hobson-Jobson. If so, it says something about who you are or who you hope to be. And what if you say something in class that reveals your knowledge of Hobson-Jobson , and someone comes up to you afterward and reveals her own knowledge of it, while admiring yours?
Then, she pulls out her tablet and shows you the icon, and what else can you do but the same? There are many other thorny considerations that complicate the task of counting individual words and tallying up the language in that way. Similarly, there are twelve different words with the spelling "post" entered in Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged ; they all have different parts of speech or derivations.
Should these twelve be considered one word for the purposes of our reckoning? Buy this and never be conned again!
But his agenda shifted from writing a dictionary showing the English language at its peak of perfection to one that captured the language as it shifted. Naughty lexicography. Oxford English Dictionary Our greatest dictionary I would say that was planned as a comprehensive index of English, containing every word and meaning ever used.
So they left it out. But the dictionary soon settled down to include a glorious sweep of English of all types: formal, slang, British, American, South African, etc, and set the framework for national dictionaries across the world. The language of Anglo-India was fading when Yule and Burnell compiled their lively and discursive compendium, but it remains today to remind us of the remarkable and often problematic interaction between the British imperialists and the general Indian populace before Partition.
Where else would you find a hosbolhookum an official document issued on royal authority? Most of all, he haunted the music halls, especially south of the river, jotting down and preserving for us the vibrant street expressions that he heard all around him.
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