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You are here: Home > Forum > A Place of Safety > General Talk > Purges on Dictionaries
Purges on Dictionaries  [message #35911] Fri, 22 September 2006 07:44 Go to previous message
timmy

Has no life at all
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13818



Interesting report from Lexis Nobile, a journal of words and letters, regretably not online:

All the neologisms nowadays are making dictionaries longer and longer. We seem unable to turn around before someone has added new words, new phrases, to the ever increasing wordlists. Now the Shorter Oxford Dictionary (actually a weighty tome in its own right) is planning a reshuffle.

The full edition, which we'd really prefer to know as "The whole shebang", will continue to contain and track the English language to the fullest possible extent, based on verifiable words. But "shebang" is a neologsim that will not make the cut for the Shorter dictionary, despite being acknowledged in the language for many years.

Alongside the project they are removing words no longer in common parlance. This includes such terms as stouthrief, and hamesucken, both crimes in Scotland, but wholly non notable anywhere else, one meaning entering a home forcibly with a view to theft, and the other meaning the same, plus beating the crap out of the householder. Other words not to make the cut alongside shebang include "gullible", "palimpsest", and brand names such as "rotovator". The "Corn Flake" remains, despite being a brand name.

Critics have said that this is a precursor to the rationalisation of spelling, potentially on the US model, where apparently redundnat letters are stripped away. They fear that "modelling" will become "modeling", and that "leverage" will also be redefined as a verb instead of a noun.

Never say this forum is not educational.


Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
 
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