Proposal: A separate antedatings list

[Paul Johnston]

I see lexicography as definitely on topic for ADS.  Though my
personal dialect interests are not really on antedatings and regional
culinary terms, my No. 1 mail system, thank god, lets me simply
delete them quickly if I want to (and sometimes I read them), and
I read with interests about other systems that do the same.  I can
see the point of people who don't like the postings, and must read
every one, but I see the ADS as a broad church--and the study of
lexicon definitely goes in, particularly if it is regional.  I
support keeping the list as is.

Yours,
Paul Johnston
On Nov 4, 2007, at 10:29 AM, Jesse Sheidlower wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jesse Sheidlower <jester at PANIX.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Proposal: A separate antedatings list
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>
> On Sun, Nov 04, 2007 at 02:52:10PM +0000, ronbutters at AOL.COM wrote:
>>
>> It is ironic that all these strictly lexicographical matters
>> are posted to the "dialect" list & not the DSNA. It is largely
>> just a matter of history, but also: does DSNA archive its
>> entries? And if so, & if we posted antedatings and culinary
>> terms there, archive searchers would have to enter their
>> searches 3 times instead of 2 (which Jesse S thinks somehow
>> would be more inconvenient than having to delete numerous
>> unwanted messages every day).
>
> Uh, the culinary postings seem to me to be not even remotely
> lexicographical--these are entirely about regional variation
> in American English, but are not things that would go into
> most dictionaries, and are thus suited for ADS-L but not DSNA,
> all other considerations aside.
>
> Ron, if the problem is that you don't like this one category
> of postings, can I suggest that you just set a filter on the
> poster who generates the vast majority of them? This seems to
> be possible in AOL (thanks to Grant for finding the link):
>
> http://help.channels.aol.com/kjump.adp?articleId=217148#faq1
>
> And it's widely possible in most other e-mail clients. I'd
> think this one-time effort would be more convenient than
> either deleting numerous unwanted messages or compelling
> various people to perform multiple searches, etc.
>
> Jesse Sheidlower
>
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