British bias in the OED :-)

George Thompson george.thompson at NYU.EDU
Mon Dec 17 16:23:16 UTC 2012


On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 2:20 PM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>wrote:

> In that case, the school colors of all universities should be in the OED.
>  And the mascots and symbols of all big-league sports teams.
>

To the extent that readers may encounter sentences like "He is [a color]",
meaning "he is a graduate of [a school]".

I don't know how common this would be, in the U. S.  I attended Boston U.,
but do not expect to be referred to as a Red (except in the political
sense).  I do see the sports teams from Syracuse &c. referred to as The
Orangemen, &c; and the teams of other schools referred to as "The Badgers",
&c.  The overall context of whatever writing contains such designations
will probably make clear what they signify, but the sentence out of context
will puzzle.

Is this a problem that a comprehensive dictionary should try to address?

--
George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much since then.

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