Succinct comment on dictionaries in today's New York Times

[Dick Margulis <margulisd -at- comcast -dot- net>]

During the summer, William Safire takes a long vacation from the On 
Language column in the New York Times Magazine, and it is given over to 
guest columnists.

Today's column is by Barbara Wallraff. Wallraff, "the author of 'Your 
Own Words,' is a senior editor of The Atlantic Montly and the editor of 
the newsletter Copy Editor: Language News for the Publishing Profession."

Her last paragraph is worth noting:

"As someone who regularly uses seven dictionaires--actually, way more 
than that--in print, on CD-ROM and online, I'm not here to tell you that 
dictionaries are useless.... But to extract from a dictionary all the 
knowledge that went into it, we need to understand what jobs the makers 
of a particular dictionary intended it for, to read the front matter and 
get to know our dictionary well and to be as skeptical and sophisticated 
about the information in a dictionary as we are about information found 
elsewhere."

[Nitpickers will note that the above quotations conform to Times style 
as regards punctuation, compound words, etc.; don't blame the author.]

Techwr-l tie-in: We often have raging debates in these precincts about 
descriptivism vs. prescriptivism in matters lexicographic. Wallraff, in 
the full essay from which the above is excerpted, and probably at 
greater length in her new book, makes clear that she understands how to 
differentiate among dictionaries in that regard.

Elsewhere in the essay, she points out the annoying unintended 
consequence of a style rule that says always pick the first of alternate 
spellings: that even though the lexicographer states explicitly that 
either spelling is acceptable and they are roughly equal in frequency, 
the mere fact of having to place one first inevitably leads to its being 
used with greater frequency.

Anyway, it was an interesting read on a holiday weekend. I choose not to 
access the Times online, a personal mischigas (don't bother writing to 
tell me to subscribe pseudonymously); so perhaps someone else will 
choose to post a link to the article.

Dick

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