thy thigh etc.

[Douglas G Kilday]

Larry Trask (24 May 2001) wrote:

>[DGK]
>>Excuse my skepticism, but I can't believe the _net_ number of contentives
>>in a given language is growing constantly. As new contentives enter a
>>language, others exit. Lexica don't have rubber walls.

>[LT]
>Debatable.  If we look at the consecutive editions of any good desk
>dictionary of English, we find that these become steadily larger over time,
>in spite of the best efforts of lexicographers to prune any items which
>seem to have dropped out of use.  It seems that very many of the new words
>do not replace anything: 'geopathic', 'mogul' (in the skiing sense),
>'cellphone', 'hahnium', and, of course, 'tzatziki'.

[DGK]
The tendency to equate the physical size of desk dictionaries with the size
of the underlying lexicon (or "lexis" if you prefer) should be avoided.
Several factors favor the continued growth of desk dictionaries (with the
literary exception of the Newspeak dictionary in Orwell's "1984", which got
smaller every year).

First, and most importantly, it's much easier to attest a word than it is to
"unattest" it. Someone once said "it's hard to write an epitaph for a word".
I'd say "hard" is understated; it's comparable to proving the extinction of
an obscure tropical bug. If a lexicographer asserted that a given word was
extinct, resulting in its being pruned from the desk dictionary, and the
word reappeared in actual use, the publisher could have considerable egg on
his face. What sane lexicographer would jeopardize his job in this manner?
Unless he managed to break into the ranks of professional Scrabble, an
unemployed lexicographer (fired for cause) would be facing tough times
indeed. Nevertheless, words do become extinct (or "obsolete"). A hard-core
dictionary like the OED or my ponderous Funk & Wagnalls Standard (1903) will
give thousands of words marked as obsolete. It's not the job of a desk
dictionary to track extinction.

Second, consumers would feel short-changed if each edition were _not_ larger
than the previous one. If the new dictionary couldn't boast of being "new,
improved, and _enlarged_", why would anyone buy it? If they didn't already
have an older edition, they could find one at a garage sale. Publishers need
to make money.

Third, this enlargement can be made at marginal cost, since the core of the
new dictionary already exists in the old one. Why bother paying
lexicographers to tramp around the boondocks trying to verify the extinction
of obscure words? Leave 'em in! Anyone using a _desk_ dictionary is likely
to regard it as a prescriptive authority (not as a bank of scholarly data,
like the OED) and anything in it is _eo ipso_ a valid word.

It's easy enough to point to new words that don't replace anything. It's
less easy to find extinct words that weren't replaced by anything, but they
do (or did) exist: words pertaining to obsolete tools, equipment,
manufacturing processes, agricultural practices, social groups, dishes,
beverages, etc. They can be found in hard-core dictionaries which dare to
mark words "obsolete" or give dates of final attestation. All things
considered, net stasis of lexical size makes more sense than continuous
expansion.