meta

[Federico Escobar]

Paul is right, of course, about the XXL price of the OED's online
subscription. It's just too much for an independent scholar or a language
professional who doesn't have the sponsorship of a university. There should
be a special price for unaffiliated suscriptions.

But, luckily, there's a middle ground, which I heartily recommend, and it's
the CD-ROM version. The latest version is called "Oxford English Dictionary,
2nd Edition, Version 4.0," and it's available in Amazon for $214.57
(discounted from $295.00). That's the one I use, and it works peachily. It
won't include the meganewest entries drafted last month, but its search
tools will help you find those words that are burrowed in other entries.

F.



On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 4:32 AM, Paul Frank <paulfrank at post.harvard.edu>wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Paul Frank <paulfrank at POST.HARVARD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: meta
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 9:22 AM, Jesse Sheidlower <jester at panix.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, Nov 01, 2010 at 08:49:33AM +0100, Paul Frank wrote:
> >> Here's a word for your scholarly dissection: meta.
> >>
> >> Perhaps the most meta moment of the week. In the episode, Charlie
> >> drinks beer on the couch and jokes about his "$2500 date experiences,"
> >> while preparing to go out with the well-preserved dermatologist who
> >> "scraped a pre-cancerous mole off my ass."
> >> Â  Â  TV Guide, Oct 29, 2010
> >>
> >> The event proved a mass demonstration of noncommittal cleverness,
> >> quirk and irony. Through signage, some rally-goers competed to be the
> >> most topical ("One man's socialism is another man's uninformed
> >> buzzword"), the most off-topical ("I love pineapples") and the most
> >> meta ("I am holding a sign").
> >> Â  Washington Post, October 31.
> >>
> >> "Meta moment" gets 23,000 googlits.
> >
> > This is in OED; the first adjectival example is from 1988, the
> > first noun from 1993.
> >
> > Jesse Sheidlower
> > OED
>
> Thanks Jesse. You're talking me into forking out the money for a
> subscription to the online edition, because half the time I don't find
> what's hidden somewhere in the paper edition of the OED (and I do know
> the alphabet). I guess that ".. oh look! A puppy!" is also in the OED
> as a convenient phrase (or meme, if you will) to indicate a short
> attention span. My favorite sign from this weekend's rally was carried
> by a New Yorker: "Americans for ... oh look! A puppy!" - which speaks
> volumes about the attention span of today's electorate and the media
> that feeds it news and pseudo-news.
>
> Paul
>
>
> Paul Frank
> Translator
> Chinese, German, French, Italian > English
> Espace de l'Europe 16
> Neuchâtel, Switzerland
> paulfrank at bfs.admin.ch
> paulfrank at post.harvard.edu
>
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