OED in Sunday NY Times Magazine

Bapopik at AOL.COM Bapopik at AOL.COM
Sun Nov 5 04:54:16 UTC 2006


_http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/05/magazine/05cyber.html_ 
(http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/05/magazine/05cyber.html) 
...
Cyber-Neologoliferation 
 
By _JAMES GLEICK_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/james_gleick/index.html?inline=nyt-per) 
Published: November 5, 2006

 
When I got to John Simpson and his band of lexicographers in Oxford earlier  
this fall, they were working on the P’s. Pletzel, plish, pod person,  
point-and-shoot, polyamorous — these words were all new, one way or another.  They had 
been plowing through the P’s for two years but were almost done (except  that 
they’ll never be done), and the Q’s will be “just a twinkle of an eye,”  
Simpson said. He prizes patience and the long view. A pale, soft-spoken man of  
middle height and profound intellect, he is chief editor of the Oxford English 
 Dictionary and sees himself as a steward of tradition dating back a century 
and  a half. “Basically it’s the same work as they used to do in the 19th 
century,”  he said. “When I started in 1976, we were still working very much on 
these index  cards, everything was done on these index cards.” He picked up a 
stack of  6-inch-by-4-inch slips and riffled through them. A thousand of these 
slips were  sitting on his desk, and within a stone’s throw were millions 
more, filling  metal files and wooden boxes with the ink of two centuries, words, 
words, words. 
(...)

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