HDAS, Merriam-Webster's 11th in Safire's column

[Bapopik at AOL.COM]

CORRECTION:  That headline should be "And Patter Flash Like a Real Cull" in
my last post, not "Call."  It's hard to read these things.


   Safire's "On Language" column in the Sunday NEW YORK TIMES Magazine
mentions Webster's 11th, DARE, and the Oxford acquisition of the HDAS.
   Safire wonders what the HDAS will have on "smart aleck."  I, too, wonder
how Gerald Cohen's work on that will be presented...Safire mentions words that
can't be printed in the TIMES.  I gotta believe that he was thinking that the
next volume of HDAS will have a lot of good "shit."
   Also interesting was this, from the folks at Oxford:

''We want to build a whole online slang project with this at its core,''
Grathwohl says, ''a slang resource center and living language project.'' He
envisions a ''slang watch'' and a yearbook of ''the best American slang of 2004,
that sort of thing. By being able to finish this work, Oxford will play a pivotal
role in documenting the way Americans speak.'' Why? The British lexie
subvented me easily: ''Slang is the sexiest part of a language.''


   Shouldn't the ADS be doing this?
   I argued here years ago that "Among the New Words" should be online.  Paul
McFedries "Word Spy" does an excellent job of this, but I always believed
that ADS should be doing this stuff.  Oh well, we missed out on a part of our
mission.