DARE

[Laurence Horn]

Unlike that very nice piece (with accompanying podcast) on vocal fry in today's Times that Geoff Nathan mentioned, there was a pretty sad story at the end of the ABC World News Tonight tonight with Diane Sawyer who explained that "a new dictionary is out", referring of course to the final volume completing the wonderful, but not exactly brand new, DARE project.  I think she did identify it quickly as the Dictionary of American Regional English, but if so that part went by very quickly and the story by John Berman giving illustrations of funny regional words, not very clearly presented (you sometimes couldn't tell which were the lexical items and which were the glosses when they went up on the screen), never mentioned DARE at all.  He says "It's a celebration of our diversity", but he never actually says what "it" is.  Oh well, I guess any publicity--even barely any publicity--is better than no publicity.

LH

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org