British bias in the OED

[Joel S. Berson]

At 12/18/2012 08:50 AM, Amy West wrote:
>On 12/18/12 12:00 AM, Automatic digest processor wrote:
>>The question of whether to include team names in general in dictionaries
>>is different. This extends beyond college teams: Ron Butters has
>>presented various papers arguing that entries like_Giant_  'a member of
>>the New York Giants football team' should be entered into general
>>dictionaries. But few dictionaries do.
>I would resist that because it a) it's in that tricky "Proper Noun"
>territory and b) should be self-explanatory given the context. And I say
>this as a sports ignoramous. Even *I* can tell the difference . . .
>
>Similarly, as for the original question re: the color sense, again, as a
>reader/listener it may take me a little while to work out from the
>context that the color is being used to identify the school/team, but I
>should be able to. It's when it becomes much more opaque that there
>would be need for an entry. But at that point are you going to list
>every school that uses that color? I don't think so.
>
>---Amy West

To maintain a level Atlantic, the equitable thing to do would be to
remove sense 9 from "blue, n.".  After all, if there are about
4,900,000 Google hits for "light blue" + Columbia, and for the
slightly older Yale about 31,400,000 for "dark blue", but only about
4,950,000 for "dark blue" + Oxford and merely 3,520,000 for "old Blue" ...

Joel

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