[Fwd: [Fwd: a publishing dilemma]]

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

This is really interesting. I doubt that this could be a PADS ms. at this
late date, but it is possible that Connie Eble might be interested in putting
some of this in AMERICAN SPEECH.

It would also, of course, most likely be a real service to scholarship to
post the manuscript on the web.


Ron Butters
Chief Editor, American Dialect Society Publications

In a message dated 4/3/2001 9:25:24 PM, kant1 at RCNCHICAGO.COM writes:

<< Following Allan Metcalf's suggestion, I am sending the following inquiry

to the ADS list serve.  I will be pleased to receive your communications

on this dilemma.  Joanne Spencer Kantrowitz, Ph.D., Chicago, 1967


-------- Original Message --------

     Subject: [Fwd: a publishing dilemma]

        Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2001 20:02:27 -0500

        From: nathan & joanne kantrowitz <kant1 at rcnchicago.com>

Organization: Writers

          To: joanne kantrowitz <kant1 at rcnchicago.com>





-------- Original Message --------

     Subject: a publishing dilemma

        Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2001 22:52:31 -0600

        From: nathan & joanne kantrowitz <kant1 at rcnchicago.com>

Organization: Writers

          To: AAllan at aol.com


Dear Professor Metcalf,

We have had the strange experience recently of meeting a prison language

research professor who had been searching for our study in vain.  That

is/was Stateville Names which was cited by McDavid and Maurer in their

revision of Mencken, was supposed to be published by PADS around 1965

and then was shot down over fear of right-wing attack and threat to the

first federal grant forthcoming for Cassidy's dictionary. The Ms. was

the first full study of prison language as collected in Stateville

Penitentiary and, of necessity, contained much maladiction.   The Ms.

languished with a small publisher who went defunct after losing tenure

in the 70's.  In disgust, we laid the book aside.

One portion of it was published by Alan Dundes in his Mother Wit

anthology.  In other words, the work has been footnoted, listed in

bibliographies (?), but no one had access to it because it was never

published.  Two copies exist in typescript:  one is deposited with the

papers of David W. Maurer at the University of Louisville; the other is

with the Chicago Historical Society in the Stateville Papers of Nathan

Kantrowitz.

Whether this is worth posting on the web or listed with an on-demand

publisher, I haven't the slightest idea.  Perhaps, for the sake of

future scholars (few though they may be), the locations of the ms.

should be published somewhere in the journals of ADS.  What do you think

of that suggestion?

Each of us went on to publish other sorts of things in other sorts of

media, but we never returned to the linguistic group after the deaths of

Raven and Dave who were our chief contacts and friends, albeit powerless

in the face of Cassidy's concerns.  Do you by any chance have an e-mail

address for Alan Dundes?  His book is still in print, but I would like

to correct his description of my work.  (I was not a faculty wife!).

For a rather amusing essay detailing who we are, you might consult

Nathan Kantrowitz's

1990 book, Close Control.

Best wishes,


Joanne Spencer Kantrowitz


--

MZ

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