OED editing, antedating peril ephemera, was Re: [ADS-L] The competitive sport of antedating

[Jonathon Green]

Jesse Sheidlower wrote:
>
> I think doing something like this would prove to be extremely
> confusing and useless to almost everyone who looked at it,
> unless an extremely large amount of editorial effort were
> involved. (An example where such effort has been expended is
> the OED's science fiction project, at
> http://www.jessesword.com/sf, which does in fact link to the
> OED's citation databases for the relevant words, but even here
> there are significant problems with the list.)
>
> As someone who gets to see the kind of comments the OED gets
> from the general public, trust me when I say that encouraging
> more of this would involve an exceptional amount of editorial
> time and energy with very little positive result.
>
> Jesse Sheidlower
> OED
>
>
>
Jesse is absolutely right. The public at large may be well-meaning, but
lexicographical professionals and/or scholars they are not. As I
suggested in a talk at this year's DSNA, the finding of antedates is
still pretty much a lottery, but those of us who pursue the task as
professionals are still the best qualified for the task. When the OED
put out their list of terms to be antedated for this year's series of
Balderdash & Piffle I found that of the slang examples my database could
better two-thirds and equal the remainder. My intention is not to boast:
this is my job, I _ought_ to be able to do so. My partner Susie Ford,
researching for me at the British Library on a vast range of
slang-related materials, finds antedates great and small almost every
working day. We don't parade them, it's simply one part - and
undoubtedly a satisfying one - of what we do in making a dictionary.

The producers of B&P filmed me for two shows, and used one; their
problem being, I was told, that they couldn't keep throwing forward the
same smart-ass. Quite right, but as Jesse implies, and as the B&P team
told me, while the public are keen, all too often it's a matter of 'my
grandmother/great-uncle/milkman's mother-in-law' used to say....'  And
nary a syllable's supporting data. Or, if etymologies are essayed, that
for instance the great monosyllable is _definitely_ an acronym of
'fornicate under command of the king'. Of course we cannot expect them
to be lexicographers, but that's the point; they aren't and the best of
intentions won't make it so. And as Jesse points out, such a flood of
ultimately irrelevant information  merely clogs the machine - and its
maintenance requires more than enough energy as it is.

JG

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