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[Peter A. McGraw]

--On Wednesday, August 14, 2002 11:08 AM -0700 Anne Gilbert
<avgilbert at PRODIGY.NET> wrote:

>  And since all of us
> speak some form of language, it seems to me that in some broad sense "we"
> are "experts" too.


Being native speakers of American English doesn't make us experts (as
someone pointed out in a recent post), but it does make us potential
informants.  This is what makes a lot of the threads on ads-l interesting.
I'm talking about the many exchanges that go something like:
"I recently heard a visitor from Minneapolis use the word 'widget.'  I
never heard the word here in Nevada."
"That's funny--I've lived in Needles, CA, all my life, and I hear it all
the time."
(Etc. etc.)

Often somebody finally says (though probably not in the case of "widget")
"This word is covered in DARE.  See vol. x p. y."  I admit to getting so
caught up in some of these discussions that I forget to consult DARE before
chiming in.

While these exchanges do not by themselves constitute scientific samples
that someone could use as the sole basis for an article on the geographic
distribution of, say, "widget," not a few of them uncover things that
aren't, or aren't yet, covered in DARE, and the professional
dialectologists on the list are as intrigued by them as anyone else.  Who
knows--some of the scholars on the list might even decide to pick up one of
these threads and pursue the topic all the way to an article in American
Speech.

If ads-l were restricted to shop talk among the professional linguists and
lexicographers, this sort of exchange would likely occur much less often
than it does now, with far fewer contributions to it, and the remaining
members would be the poorer for it.

Peter Mc.
(a trained, though no longer practicing, linguist)


****************************************************************************
                               Peter A. McGraw
                   Linfield College   *   McMinnville, OR
                            pmcgraw at linfield.edu