Language: A Light(er) extinguished

Abstract

`After 16 Years, Dr Lighter's Lexicon, Half-Done, Still Earns Experts' Praise' Wall Street Journal, 7 September 2000 Thus the terse summation of sixteen years' work, brought to an abrupt halt, as the story that follows explains, not, for once, through the havering of a dilatory author, but by the self-defeating inability and aesthetic shortsightedness of a commercial publishing giant to follow through on a deal. I should explain: `Dr Lighter's Lexicon' is properly known as the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (RHDAS). Commissioned in 1984 to create a single-volume dictionary of American slang (a sorely needed contribution, given the manifest inadequacies of the then exemplar of the form: Robert Chapman's Dictionary of American Slang), the linguist Jonathan Lighter, tenured at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, set to work. The single volume was due for 1986 (and a deadline of that nature, even for one volume, might have warned him of problems ahead), but it would not be until 1994 that Random House were able to publish anything: volume 1, the letters A-G. In publishing terms it might have been (a) appallingly late, and (b), for all its size, only one third of the commissioned whole, but in those of lexicography it was a huge and wholly deserved success. Reviewers raved and users knew that here was an outstanding work, not merely of slang collection, but of lexicography on any level. With the exception of its equally impressive linguistic `cousin', Frederick Cassidy's Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), `Dr Lighter's Lexicon' was shaping up to be the most important essay in American dictionary-making since Webster's Third International of 1961. Lighter, whose studies of slang had commenced in 1972 when, fresh out of college, his glossary of doughboy usages from World War I became one of the longest articles ever published in the academic journal American Speech, had aimed at providing `the OED of slang'. In the light of subsequent problems, he talks of `hubris', but such is hindsight. As a fellow toiler in Dr Johnson's `lower employments of life', I can attest that this was, as the vocabulary has it, the bee's knees and indeed the veritable dog's bollocks. Based on the same `historical' method as Sir James Murray brought to the OED (i.e. with nuanced definitions underpinned by a vast range of usage citations), the RHDAS was definitely on line to stand beside its great progenitor. A second volume, bringing the headwords to `O' appeared in 1997. Since then, to widespread disappointment, not to mention an increasing sense of bewilderment, nothing. Lighter remains on post, but the dictionary, although its research is apparently completed, remains becalmed. What happened? What happened was that a commercial publisher, tied to the increasingly short-term impulses that drive such organisations, lost its bottle. The two published volumes, published respectively at $65 and $55, sold a respectable 25,000 copies between them (Lighter has received around $125,000 in advances and royalties) -- but that was not enough. Costs, claimed Random House, were simply too high. Dr Lighter has resolutely (some might suggest foolishly) eschewed the world of databases, preferring the tried-and-tested 5 by 3 card. Keyboarding his material was the first drain on resources; the making of the books (large hardbacks, excellently designed, properly sewn, on high-quality paper) weighed further on the bottom line. Random House, now a scion of the German media megacorp Bertelsmann AG, called a halt. Ironically, the flow of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (some $400,000) has also dried up: the NEH is reluctant to provide more funds in part because the work is owned by a commercial publisher. But that same commercial publisher, who are sidestepping any real discussion of the problem, have no intention of allowing the project to proceed. No further volumes are on schedule, now or in the foreseeable future. …