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

[George Thompson]

Grant Barrett advises Stephen Goranson:

Finally, Stephen, I think you are petitioning the wrong organization.
Instead, I'd be drafting your email as an article proposal and then
sending it as a query to various popular periodicals. Trumpet the
true story of jazz! That is the opening that OED's long update times
has left for you and other scholars. Get out there with factual,
interesting articles and widely report your antedatings and those of
your colleagues.

I've been working on an article for one of the annual SABR (Society for American Baseball Research) on the origin of "jazz" in baseball.  My hope is, that this article will alert these harmless crackpots that if they are reading early 20th C newspapers looking for news of their favorite teams and come upon the word "jazz", they have found something notable.  I'm hoping that 1913 won't prove the earliest occurrence.

For my part, as I read early 19th C newspapers, whenever I find the editor showing off a new word, giving his readers a nudge so that they will notice how up to date he is, putting a word or phrase in quotes, or italics, or introducing it with "as the boys say" or "to use a western expression" or the like, I make a note of it.  This has produces some absolute antedatings, some antedatings for the U. S. (which the OED seems unconcerned with) and a few entirely new words.

A problem with the fascination with antedatings is that occurrences that aren't antedatings are seen as valueless.  But they may illustrate the word's meaning better than the original instance, or show a new nuance -- as the difference between "jazz" as "energy, spirit" and "jazz" as "nonsense, foolishness".  The stuff I fuind that aren't antedatings I don't send here, usually, but I do send to Jonathan & Jonathon.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

----- Original Message -----
From: Grant Barrett <gbarrett at WORLDNEWYORK.ORG>
Date: Friday, October 19, 2007 2:51 pm
Subject: Re: OED editing, antedating peril ephemera, was Re: [ADS-L] The competitive sport of antedating
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU


> On Oct 19, 2007, at 07:35, Stephen Goranson wrote:
> > A relatively simple change in editing practice could yield great
> > improvements and speed contributions to learning.
>
> Jesse and Jonathon have very ably responded already, but I think this
> point needs to be further responded to.
>
> I believe that "jazz" is a pet word for a handful of people. I
> believe most people--scholars and musicians included--could give two
> poots in a puddle about it. There are many pet words like that. "Emo"
> is a hotly contested words for a certain crowd.
>
> Should lexicographers prefer to work on entries for pet words over
> any other part of a dictionary? No, they shouldn't. There are limited
> budgets, limited personnel, and limited time. Even unpaid reading
> programs cost precious pounds. Flights of fancy to work on pet words
> may satisfy individuals, but not the larger goal of the project.
>
> To put Jesse's point a different way: Every task in dictionary-making
> is "simple," but there are oodles of simple tasks to each entry that
> make up the time-consuming editing process. Once you crack open an
> entry to make a quotation change, you are compelled to review the
> entire thing. Does the new quote change any editorial notes? Does it
> introduce new evidence that needs supporting or refuting? Do we refer
> to that quote in another entry? There's always more than a simple
> thing to fix.
>
> Looking at this from a different angle, I'd say that excessive
> attention to finding antedatings has distracted some very fine minds
> that might better spend their time finding words which are so far
> unrecorded in any dictionary. Antedatings are fun but rarely
> profitable nor informative beyond the date itself. (Though I do have
> that lexicographer's disease--one of many--that would like to see
> "jazz" made right just for the sake of accuracy.)
>
> Finally, Stephen, I think you are petitioning the wrong organization.
> Instead, I'd be drafting your email as an article proposal and then
> sending it as a query to various popular periodicals. Trumpet the
> true story of jazz! That is the opening that OED's long update times
> has left for you and other scholars. Get out there with factual,
> interesting articles and widely report your antedatings and those of
> your colleagues.
>
> Grant Barrett
> Double-Tongued Dictionary
> http://www.doubletongued.org/
> editor at doubletongued.org
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org