Dictionaries in the News

Today I decided to add a "dictionaries in the news" element to my blogorama...How much do they come up? How are they used? Well, there's this gem from the NYTimes on Hillary Clinton's expression, a "bird-dog minute," courtesy of ever lexically dependable William Safire. If it isn't a southernism (bird-dog as verb appears first in a Galveston newspaper in the even more dependable OED), than it's certainly a westernism and something that should suggest that she is conversant with the practices of the outdoor sport.

And then, finally, I've been musing about "misunderestimate." It seems to have become a way to poke fun at Republican campaigners, but I fear that its constant use by CNN newsheads will lend it some credibility. What has been Bush's lexical legacy? How have his malapropisms poisoned our pool of words? In one hundred years, will Olympic high jumpers misunderestimage the height of the pole? And what would that mean anyway? Can one underestimate accurately to begin with? Just some philological thoughts...

Nine minutes til the bus...

I guess one point of blogging is that one should write every day. Is this correct? Okay...well I have eight minutes until the first grade bus departs my daughter's school and I switch into full mommy mode. So I created a "tcnjenglishbooks" wiki where the TCNJ English department could start talking about our favorite books, or books we've read, or, I suppose, even books we wish to read. I wanted to be quiet about it, but word's gotten out and it's out of my control. I guess that wikis aren't supposed to be controlled. I find it all very disturbing.

More about dictionaries: I did a dictionary task with my students today in my writing course that I think was very provocative and says a great deal about how we read. I asked them to read George Will's editorial, McCain in a Glass House.

My students read it and got the gist of his argument that John McCain isn't as pious as he seems. Once I asked them to identify words they didn't feel confident about (anonymously--I wrote mine on the board: condign), we looked them up in my favorite, the OED. Then we worked over the text with the meanings in their head. They seemed to get more out of it a second time.

It still makes me think about the core question: how do readers decide if they're going to read dictionaries?

So you've got a blog...big deal. Who doesn't?

Well, I've started thinking a great deal about blogging. What does it mean to keep a blog? Is a blog a journal that you write and reveal to the world? Is it a public diary? Why would you want to have a public diary? Yuck.

But a blog might be a space where I can reflect on things that I worry about but don't vocalize; perhaps it's a space where I can say something scholarly in a way that won't bore people to tears. Then again, it might. Perhaps a blog might be another site of rejection: what happens if you write a blog that no one reads?

So I've been thinking about dictionaries a lot lately (another sigh from the non-existent audience--"What's new about that?"), and wondering why using a dictionary, apart from Dictionary.com, seems to be so difficult for so many people. In fact, I just came from a presentation where a colleague reported that her students (who are also my students) struggled with words like "paradoxically," "ubiquitous," and other words that I thought were "ubiquitous" enough in everyday college discourse that they should be able to recognize them. But do we ask our students to read so much so quickly that they fear stopping and looking up an unfamiliar word in a dictionary?

Or are readers afraid of dictionaries? Is there something intimidating about a dictionary? Do we fear being wrong about the meaning of a word? These are just questions...but perhaps I can find some answers.

Whew...no misspellings found. I guess I can publish now.