Virginia McDavid

VARIATIONS IN DICTIONARY LABELING PRACTICES

The practice of labeling some words and senses in a dictionary with warning symbols or words is not a new one, going back in English lexicography to the seventeenth century. At first symbols like a dagger or check appeared to indicate words whose use the editor thought should be restricted in some way. They included hard words, hybrid words, and technical and dialect terms among others. Samuel Johnson at first intended to use symbols also, but in the dictionary itself he uses such terms as low, burlesque, cant, and ludicrous, though not with a clear distinction among them. Labeling practices in modem dictionaries have come a long way from the eighteenth century both in the number of labels used and the precision with which they are applied. The very amount of information about actual usage available to a dictionary editor raises a question perhaps of more interest to teachers and to lexicographers. It is the extent and type of variation among dictionaries. Another question may be of more interest to teachers than to lexicographers; this is the relation between attitudes about usage items and the actual status of the items themselves. One of the pioneer studies of English usage dealt with opinions about disputed items. This was Current English Usage by Sterling Andrus Leonard. The study was made by Leonard in 1927 and published by the National Council of Teachers of English as its first English monograph in 1932. Leonard submitted a questionnaire of 230 usage items to a group of 229 judges. These were such typical items as cadmay , come/carne, and kind of, items “of whose standing there might be some question.” Also included were matters of punctuation, but these are ,omitted here. A selection of these expressions and the context in which they appear is in the Appendix. The judges in the Leonard survey included linguists; members of the National Council and of the Modern Language Association; speech teachers; and authors, editors, and businessmen. The judges were asked to put the items into one of four categories:

Dimensions of Usage and Dictionary Labeling

The practice of labeling words or senses in English dictionaries is far from a new one. Among seventeenth-century dictionaries Edward Phillips in the various editions of the New World of Words used symbols like a dagger or a check to indicate words whose use he thought should be restricted in some way. Those which he marked included hybrid words, hard words--unassimilated Latin terms--and terms of art-what we would call technical terms. In his revision of Phillips and in his own dictionary John Kersey also used symbols. He marked an almost entirely new set of words, but again included hard words as well as obsolete words and technical terms. Kersey also condemned low words--what we might call popular terms, including cant, argot, and sometimes dialect terms. Nathaniel Bailey in his dictionaries marked words also; his groups again fall into hard words, obsolete terms, and low words--cant and dialect. The same categories are found among the words Benjamin , Martin marked in his dictionary of 1749. N. E. Osselton in Branded Words in English Dictionaries Before Johnson (1958) concludes that before Johnson the corpus of &dquo;branded words&dquo; was about two thousand. In his Plan of an English Dictionary of 1747, Samuel Johnson announced his intention of marking several classes of words by symbols, including poetic words, obsolete words, &dquo;words used in burlesque and familiar compositions&dquo;, and &dquo;barbarous or impure words and expressions&dquo; so that these might be &dquo;carefully eradicated wherever they are found.&dquo; In the Dictionary itself Johnson includes frequent subjective, prescriptive labels: &dquo;a barbarous contraction&dquo;, &dquo;a colloquial abuse of the word&dquo;, &dquo;this sense is somewhat low&dquo;, &dquo;an unauthorized word&dquo;, &dquo;a word

The late unpleasantness: Folk names for the Civil War

Years of regional conflict resulted in the Civil War of 1861–65. The feelings of people of various regions toward the conflict are reflected in their folk names for the bloody conflict.

The usage panel in The American heritage dictionary, second college edition

Abstract The American Heritage Dictionary: Second College Edition (AHD2; 1982), like its predecessor The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language(AHD1; 1969) contains usage notes reporting the judgements of a Usage Panel on the acceptability of certain locutions. The AHD2 Panel is larger than that of AHD, and its members are slightly but not significantly more diverse in age, sex, and ethnicity; but the AHD2 Panel consists mainly of older white male language conservatives. Unlike those of AHD1, the AHD2 usage notes o not contain random comments by Panel members, they do not report specific percentages of Panel members approving or rejecting a locution, and they use more objective, less contentious language than does AHD1. Despite its larger Panel, AHD2 has fewer notes reporting Panel judgments than does AHD1 (127 in AHD2, 226 in AHD1). No correlation or interrelation can be found between Usage Panel Opinions and the treatment of the locutions in question within entries to which the usage notes...