Editorial

Abstract

Editorial Edward Finegan THIS ISSUE OF DICTIONARIES OPENS WITH AN ARTICLE THAT contrasts the differing marketing practices in British and American dictionary publishing and how those practices both reflect and support quite different dictionary cultures. Lynne Murphy argues that more than commercial competitiveness distinguishes American and British dictionary cultures—and that US competitiveness isn’t couched merely as among dictionaries but as among potential dictionary buyers. Focusing on Oxford University Press and Merriam-Webster, Murphy sees the larger cultural differences as rooted “in differing attitudes to the roles for written authority in each culture.” In another article, Elizabeth Knowles describes a different kind of publishing phenomenon. She traces the development of the relatively recent publishing area of dictionary histories, beginning with Mary Wright’s biography of her husband, Joseph Wright, editor of the English Dialect Dictionary. Knowles discusses half a dozen other histories, including Elisabeth Murray’s portrait of her uncle, James Murray, and his role as editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, and Peter Gilliver’s history of the making of the OED. In a refrain echoed elsewhere in this issue, Knowles observes “a trend towards seeing particular dictionaries in terms of their social and cultural importance.” In the third article, Anne Dykstra focuses his attention on the hypothesized link between Frisian and English posited by Joost Halbertsma and implemented in entries to his Lexicon Frisicum, completed and published by his son in 1872. Dykstra argues that Halbertsma could have done more in his dictionary to support his hypothesis but that, in the end, his lexicographical practice failed to be as persuasive as it might have been. [End Page vii] In the Reference Works in Progress section, Jack Bowers and Laurent Romary, both active participants in the refinement of the Text Encoding Initiative, describe the complexities of creating a dictionary of Mixtepec-Mixtec and amply illustrate their application of TEI to an under-resourced language. They map out how to accommodate unique combinations of features not familiar in descriptions of Indo-European languages and thus model the utility of TEI for other projects seeking to enrich language resources for indigenous languages of the Americas and elsewhere. This issue of Dictionaries contains reviews of six books, ranging from the highly popular to the deeply scholarly. Drawing on her own vast experience working with diverse dictionary publishers, Wendalyn Nichols reviews Kory Stamper’s Word by Word and finds it both fascinating and elegiac; “a singular delight” was discovering “how much [the book] captured of her own experience.” Orin Hargraves reviews Lynne Murphy’s The Prodigal Tongue, a popular treatment of British-American language differences, “chock-full of insight and solid research about matters … that show marked and rather complicated differences between the two language communities.” He writes that “no other writer on dialectal differences in English can match Murphy’s ability to helpfully place observations about usage in their linguistic, social, cultural, and historical context.” Hargraves also reviews Paul Baker’s American and British English, a more technical treatment based on analysis of the Brown family of corpora. The book’s “highly focused subject matter and somewhat problematic approach to it” will be of less interest to the lexicographer and general reader than those “undertaking examination of corpora for computational purposes,” Hargraves says. Three other reviews focus principally on historical aspects of lexicography. Elizabeth Knowles reviews the collection of “prefatory pieces to dictionaries published between the early seventeenth and the early nineteenth centuries,” edited by Rebecca Shapiro. While today’s dictionary user pays little attention to prefatory matter, Knowles writes that “Shapiro makes a strong case for matters having been different in the period covered by Fixing Babel.” In his review of The Place of Words, by Michael P. Fitzsimmons, Peter Sokolowski notes that dictionary users want practicality rather than theory: “they are seeking the authority of a dictionary … for answers to questions about words.” He characterizes The Place of Words as an [End Page viii] exploration “into the many intersections of politics and language” as related to the Académie Française and its dictionary during an “Age of Revolution.” The book’s story, Sokolowski says, is one that “resonates today with the popular view that the Académie’s...