a small plea

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Fri, Oct 31, 2003 at 06:37:30PM -0500, Dennis R. Preston wrote:
>
>Odd that the American Dialact Society should sponsor both of these
>lists, and odd that linguists/dialectologists should be construed
>somehow as "half" of what the ADS is about.

Odd too that lexicographers, who have long been an integral
part of the ADS and who run DARE, certainly the single most
widely known product of the ADS, are being treated with such
disdain for the mere fact of actively discussing the history
of American English on this list.

This is not a very high volume list, and anyone who wants to
discuss dialectology is more than welcome to do so. I don't
see any reason why this can't be the case; I'd like to see
more discussion of other issues of concern to ADS-ers. But
just because there are other AmE issues going on doesn't
prevent dialectological ones from being raised. Splitting the
list would, I think, be disastrous; it's good that we have
enough traffic as we do, and I wouldn't want to become a
low-volume list dedicated to the circulation of conference
announcements.

If anyone is so opposed to discussions of this sort, it would
be relatively easy to filter out Barry, Fred, Sam Clements,
me, George, John Baker, and a few others, and that would
probably take care of most of the lexicotraffic.

Jesse Sheidlower
OED