Editorial

Abstract

Editorial With this issue my tenure as editor of Dictionaries comes to an end. I retired from Cleveland State University on 31 December 1998, and I now retire from the editorship. Michael Adams, author of two stellar historical articles that appeared in these pages, will "succeed" me as editor; I wish him every success . His academic, scholarly work is careful and thorough, as members of the Society know from those two compelling articles: "Sanford Brown Meech at the Middle English Dictionary" (1995) and "Credit Where It's Due: Authority and Recognition at the Dictionary ofAmerican English" (1997). His contributions to the Society as editor, I am sure, will be the same; it is not irrelevant that he has just completed two successful years as the book review editor of Dictionaries. Thanks, like definitions, are hazardous, because it is impossible to know where to close the circle. Still, I thank, sincerely, our recent presidents, Virginia McDavid, David Guralnik, Sidney Landau, John Algeo, and Ed Gates. Without their encouragement and assistance, my job would not have been doable, and without hesitation, all of these leaders offered their help in myriad ways, solving editorial problems that seemed insurmountable. Their assistance manifested itself as wise counsel throughout my tenure as editor, as did the work of the many referees, those essential contributors to the modern journal. Unlike authors of articles and book reviewers, referees work to find the light while they themselves remain in the darkness: no one knows who they are, except me. Why should they do all that work for no reward at all? Because they are committed to the profession. Their efforts are as painstaking as they are anonymous. In the usual case, of course, the referee is the author's peer, so there is the danger that the referee will be captious or carping, or both. Not in my experience! Almost without exception, those who agreed to serve the Society in this vital role (not everyone was able to serve, for reasons that all of us know very well) did so cheerfully and responsibly. Almost without exception, they advised me on substantial grounds that a proposed submission to Dictionaries was pertinent, important, coherent, accurate, and convincing. Or nearly so. Or not at all so. This last category of submission presents the severest challenge to the referee and to the editor. One wants to avoid being unkind, but one feels the obligation of being helpful. What is to be said — do your homework , try to be clear, be sure to check your sources, the middle section seems unrelated to your topic, ...? I have received referees' assessments of promising submissions that have run to five or six pages single-spaced, each page filled with meticulous criticism and valuable guidance, so our journal has been graced with effective articles, because the authors and the referees have become collaborators. In the case of the colloquia published in Dictionaries — on the theory and practice of lexicography (1992-1993), neology (1995), the occasion of the centennial celebration of William Dwight Whitney's The Century Dictionary (1996) , and dialect labeling in dictionaries (1997) — a new breed of referee emerged in the persons of Bill Frawley, John Algeo, Dick Bailey, and Joan Hall, respectively. Their work made myjob quite diverting in those years. Editors are born to badger authors, or they soon learn to do so. It is not that they forget about the authors' collégial, scholarly, and pedagogical responsibilities . Certainly not. They, the editors, are similarly engaged. (Notice that I have made this impersonal.) But it begins to seem to them that for every hour that they work, another page on the calendar turns. And commas jump viiiEditorial out of their conventional places, special characters require triple overstrikes, sectors go kerflooey on diskettes, dates of publication, even names, change from one page to the next, coherence loses itself as words scramble themselves within paragraphs or sentences within paragraphs do, and worse, the editor's interventionist muse will not be quiet. I salute the authors for their forbearance and thank them for recognizing that this editor's intention was theirs — to make the best article the referee, the author, and the editor could collaboratively achieve. At times...