Proposal: An separate antedatings list

[ronbutters at AOL.COM]

I don't see how anyone could disagree with Jesse that ADS-L is old. It does not logically follow from that fact that change would not improve the efficiency of the list for users.

I can't believe that people would be less inclined to post antedatings on a list where they know most people would read them. Ditto minor food terms from South Texas or Macedonia or wherever. I delete these without reading them, and I know a lot of other people do the same. Why would anyone want to make a lot of people go to the trouble of deleting their unwanted messages?

I agree that the antedaters and the possumburger folks & the eggcorn folks are doing niche lexicography a genuine service, and I am delighted that their work is getting into the archives. I have used their results myself. I'm just suggesting that it might be more efficient (& maybe less annoying) if some of this fine work went straight to the archives. It is, after all, just data. (Well, sometimes it is more, as with the methodological and sociolinguistics issues raised in the great debates about The Whole Nine Yards; and in Zwicky's taxonomic struggles with eggcorns and related phenomena).

I am on several other list-serves, & (unlike Jesse) I don't find them to have anywhere near the amount of strictly personal stuff and fluff. I'm thinking here especially of the sort of comment that says simply, "Good point, Lulu" or "I agree." Do several hundred people really need to know that? If it isn't discussion, then why put it on a discussion list? Some lists limit the number of postings a member can post per week or per day (for some ADS-L members, per hour might be appropriate). I think such a rule would be very healthy for ADS-L.
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Jesse Sheidlower wrote:

I think that ADS-L is a vibrant and active list of long
standing, and that we should be very reluctant to make any
change to it that fragments out subjects that are, after all,
within the purview of the ADS.

Yes, we could split off antedatings, and we could create a
sociolinguistics list, and a dialectology list, and an eggcorn
list. Then we'd end up with a bunch of lists that are more
difficult to deal with and will be less fun.

There is a DSNA list that gets little traffic, and there are
lists devoted to historical slang and historical lexicography
that get very little traffic. I don't think this is something
to emulate.

I'm not interested by everything that appears on ADS-L, but I
am interested in the fact that there's always something.  The
list to me remains incredibly on-topic, and the amount of
personal material that appears here seems to be extremely
small (especially relative to what I see on other lists and
forums, which are often overwhelmingly more about personal
chatter than about their stated topics).

And I can't speak for the antedaters specifically, but I'm
sure that many people who post do so partly because they know
a lot of other people will see it. If not for this, we don't
need to create an antedatings list, because we already have
one--it's called Jesse Sheidlower's e-mail address.

30 messages a day is really not that much.

If there's a topic that ADS members feel is underrepresented
(more hardcore aspects of dialectology, say), they are free to
post more about that.

Those are my personal feelings, and are not in any official or
semi-official capacity relating to the OED or my management of
this list.




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