A Word for the Dictionaries: "Unconference"

[Shapiro, Fred]

What about my undergraduate alma mater, MIT, a school on such a pathetic athletic level that it presumably was left out of the Unconference because it couldn't meet their high athletic standards?

Fred Shapiro



________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Laurence Horn [laurence.horn at YALE.EDU]
Sent: Sunday, February 03, 2013 9:59 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: A Word for the Dictionaries: "Unconference"

On Feb 3, 2013, at 7:32 AM, Michael Quinion wrote:

> Fred Shapiro wrote
>
>> The word "unconference" is defined by Wikipedia as "a participant-driven
>> meeting."  It gets 3,200,000 hits in Google, but is not in OED nor
>> Merriam-Webster.
>
> See also http://www.worldwidewords.org/turnsofphrase/tp-unc1.htm in which
> I trace it to Usenet in 1993. I think the Wiktionary 1973 example is in a
> different sense.
>
For a different sense, "the Unconference" was used in newspaper stories as a proposed name for the low-powered University Athletic Association organized in the mid-1980s, whose members included Brandeis, the U. of Chicago, Johns Hopkins, NYU, and the U. of Rochester.

LH

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