OED, was: footnotes to recent discussions

[Lynne Murphy]

And to reinforce what Frank said to reinforce what Larry and Fred said
(this could be a nursery rhyme!):

There seems to be a weird idea among educated Americans that the OED is
some sort of arbiter of usage.  It's an upgrading of 'if it's in the
dictionary, it must be right' to 'if it's in this highfalutin dictionary,
it must be right.  (Or perhaps more likely 'if it's not in this dictionary,
it must be wrong.)  I got this all the time from my colleagues in an
English dept in the US--who SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER (Lynne gets
exasperated).  This seems to be based on a few things:
- the idea that usages with long histories are 'better'
- the idea that British English is 'better'
- complete ignorance of just how different British & American English are
- the mistaken belief that British usage of any item must be older and more
established
- belief in the Oxford brand name
- prejudice toward university presses over mainstream commercial publishers
- ignorance of the structure of the OED (which is particularly unhelpful on
prescription questions
- (very likely) mistaken use of the name OED to refer to COD or NODE, etc.

Basically, I've found all the standard false beliefs about 'the dictionary'
that one finds in the general populace to be replaced in certain academic
(or other victims of higher education's) circles with comparable false
beliefs about 'the OED'.

(Perhaps I'm in a bad mood because I spent part of the morning fighting
back lit crit beliefs about Chomsky!)

Lynne, not suffering foolishness gladly




Dr M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
Acting Director, MA in Applied Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

phone +44-(0)1273-678844
fax   +44-(0)1273-671320