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Posts tagged "dictionary"
Bonus 46: Q&A with lexicographer Emily Brewster of Merriam-Webster
How do lexicographers make the decision to add new words or meanings to their dictionaries? What makes a word easy or difficult to define? What’s the research process like for finding out the origins of words? What up and coming words are lexicographers currently keeping an eye on?
In this bonus episode of Lingthusiasm, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about the process of making dictionaries, posing your patron questions to lexicographer Emily Brewster of Merriam-Webster. We also talk about how lexicography has changed since dictionaries went online and in the era of social media, and the extremely esoteric process of getting lexicography jobs.
This is our first bonus episode where we’ve done a Q&A from patrons with a guest – let us know what you think! Are there other linguistically-relevant occupations that you’d be interested in us trying to find someone to ask questions of? Thanks to everyone in the Lingthusiasm Discord for asking such great questions! (You can keep an eye on the #ama-questions channel for any future guests.)
Announcements:
Crash Course Linguistics videos are available now and coming out weekly! Keep an eye out for them around 2pm North American Eastern Time on Fridays for the rest of 2020 (except a few holiday Fridays) and into early 2021. If you want to get an email each week with some further reading and practice exercises on each topic, you can also check out the companion issues of Mutual Intelligibility. We also have a Crash Course channel in the Lingthusiasm Discord to chat about each episode! (As well as many other fun channels if you haven’t joined the Discord yet!)
Lingthusiasm Episode 18: Translating the untranslatable
Lists of ‘untranslatable’ words always come with… translations. So what do people really mean when they say a word is untranslatable?
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch explore how we translate different kinds of meaning. What makes words like schadenfreude, tsundoku, and hygge so compelling? Which parts of language are actually the most difficult to translate? What does it say about English speakers that we have a word for “tricking someone into watching a video of Rick Astley singing Never Gonna Give You Up?”
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here
Announcements:
This month’s Patreon bonus episode is about the grammar of swearing. When we launched our Patreon this time last year (wow!) with a bonus episode about the sounds of swearing, we promised that we’d come back with even more about swearing that we didn’t have space to talk about. Now you can listen to a sweary double feature: put on bonus #1 and bonus #13 back to back! As always, episodes that aren’t specifically about swearing are swear-free.
Here are the links mentioned in this episode:
- No word for dead umbrellas?
- Dr. Jen Gunter’s “no word for…”
- Concept first, jargon second
- A meta-analysis of all ‘untranslatable emotions’ lists
- ‘Yes’ and ‘no’ in Mandarin
- Translating poetry
- The art of Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey
- Rickrolling (Know Your Meme)
- A better definition of Rickrolling
- Mate(ship)
- Early mark
- Denotation
- Connotation
- Life is HARD (Dinosaur Comics)
You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.
To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.
You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.
Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Emily Gref, our production assistant is Celine Yoon, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
“
Gretchen: One of the analogies I like to use is that language is an open source project, and dictionaries are help documentation.
Lauren: Ahhh, that’s nice.
Gretchen: If you think about an open source project, you have different people contributing to it and stuff lives or dies based on whether other people take it up. So every speaker of a language is contributing to that language’s open source project, and it’s useful to have help documentation, but help documentation often lags behind new features. Like, it still says that this menu is over here, but actually that’s not true anymore because in version 7….
Lauren: We changed the menus.
Gretchen: Exactly. Dictionaries are help documentation for a language, they’re not the language itself. Like, if a new feature isn’t in the help documentation yet, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad feature! Of course new words aren’t going to be in any dictionaries for a while – you have to implement the feature before you can add it to the help documentation. Same thing goes for minority languages: even if their dictionary is not as complete as the many English dictionaries…
Lauren: They still have all the words and they can add more words.
Gretchen: Their language is still as complex as English even if their dictionary technology – their help documentation – is less comprehensive.
”—
Excerpt from episode 8 of Lingthusiasm: People who make dictionaries.
Listen to the full episode, read the transcript, or check out the show notes for more interesting links about dictionaries.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 8: People who make dictionaries: Review of WORD BY WORD by Kory Stamper
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 8: People who make dictionaries: Review of WORD BY WORD by Kory Stamper. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 8 shownotes page.
[Theme music]
Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.
Lauren: and I’m Lauren Gawne. And today we’re going to be talking about how dictionaries get made. But first, bonus episodes! We have them. We now have bonus episodes about how to teach yourself even more linguistics with our top recommendations for books, videos, and further resources for self-study, as well as our first bonus episode about swearing.
Gretchen: and this month’s bonus on Patreon is about how to sell your awesome linguistic skills to employers. Or you can check out the Patreon at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or just follow the link on lingthusiasm.com to see those bonus episodes, support the show, and help Lingthusiasm keep growing.
[Music]
Lauren: Today we are talking dictionaries, which is a super exciting genre of book for linguists! This topic choice is for a number of reasons. The first of which is that Kory Stamper’s new book ‘Word By Word’ came out a couple of months ago and we both read it and we had the best fun reading it and we wanted to talk about it so much that we ended up just talking about it for this whole episode. The whole episode will kind of be framed around Kory’s book and some of the things that we really enjoyed about reading it, but that is not the only reason, is it Gretchen?
Gretchen: Yeah, and we’re also going to be talking about other stuff to do with dictionaries because I was recently on a panel about dictionaries at South by Southwest, and I also got to meet Kory and hang out with some other dictionary people – when she gave a talk in New York City I happen to be going down on that specific day.
Lauren: And so this episode will be another episode in the genre of ‘Gretchen makes Lauren really jealous by telling her about all the cool linguist and lexicography peeps that she got to hang out with’.
Gretchen: You just need to come here and come to a conference and then I can introduce you to everybody and it’ll be great!
Lauren: Yeah, but for now we’re all going to live vicariously through Gretchen’s excellent adventures.
Lingthusiasm Episode 8: People who make dictionaries: Review of WORD BY WORD by Kory Stamper
Dictionaries: they’re made by real people!
In episode 8 of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch talk about Word by Word, a recent book by Kory Stamper, a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster, about how dictionaries get made. (Spoiler: we liked it.) We also talk about how dictionaries get made for languages that don’t have any yet, the changing role of dictionaries on the internet and with social media, and how words often have a longer history than we expect (’g-string’, for example has been in use since at least 1878).
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here
Announcements:
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about how to sell your linguistics skills to employers! Whether it’s a semester of Linguistics 101, a BA, or a PhD, in our third bonus we share our tips for selling linguistics to future employers. We talk about why linguists have valuable skills that employers love, how to translate linguist-speak into boss-speak, the linguistic and other skills that have made our own careers possible, and cool things that other linguists have gone on to do for work. Join us on Patreon to get access to this and other bonus episodes, and help keep the show ad free!
Here are the links mentioned in this episode:
- Word by Word (Gretchen’s livetweet, Lauren’s review)
- Harmless Drudgery, Kory Stamper’s blog
- Gretchen’s SXSW dictionaries panel
- Lamjung Yolmo dictionary
- Merriam Webster’s on point Twitter
- Sue Butler on misogyny in the dictionary
- TED talks by Erin McKean on dictionaries and Wordnik: one, two
- Dictionaries have blogs now: “woke” on Oxford Dictionaries by Nicole Holliday, “ship” on Merriam-Webster, singular “they” on Dictionary.com by Jane Solomon (who’s also blogged about the upside-down smiley face)
- Recency Illusion
- The history of hipsters and g-strings
- Books about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary: Mashed Radish review of John Simpson’s The Word Detective, The Surgeon of Crowthorne aka The Professor and the Madman
- Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (DCHP-2), which Jesse Sheidlower wrote about for the New Yorker
- Auslan Signbank
- BSL Signbank
- Lexicography people mentioned in this episode to follow on twitter: Kory Stamper, Erin McKean, Ben Zimmer, Jane Solomon, Jesse Sheidlower, Katherine Connor Martin, Emily Brewster, Lauren Naturale
You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.
To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.
You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.
Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our producer is Claire Gawne, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 4: Inside the Word of the Year vote
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 4: Inside the Word of the Year vote. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 4 show notes page.
[Theme music]
Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm! A podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics. I’m Gretchen McCulloch.
Lauren: and I’m Lauren Gawne. And today we’re going to be talking about the Word of the Year. But first, since we did our last podcast, we’ve gone live, and it’s very exciting!
Gretchen: It’s more exciting for us maybe, because we’ve been keeping it a secret for a long time and now we get to see it all. We’re not talking to an imaginary audience.
Lauren: We’re talking to real people and real people who have been listening! It’s amazing. Thank you all so much.
Gretchen: And there are so many more of you than we expected and your comments have been so much more than we’ve been expecting as well – there have been more of them and they have been nicer than we expected. I don’t know, we weren’t expecting mean comments but we weren’t expecting this many nice comments either so thank you for that.
Lauren: So I feel like we’re doing a real podcast now because I get to say to people “if you like this then go to iTunes and leave a positive review” and that just makes me feel like I really am doing a podcast now that I have to beg for likes.
Gretchen: We’ve levelled up. And you should also know that we’re doing transcripts of the episodes. So if you are not a person who likes listening to things, um, I don’t know how you got this far, but if you know people who don’t like listening to things, you can send them to our transcripts which are also on our website at lingthusiasm dot com.
Lauren: And we also have a Twitter and Facebook. We’re pretty chatty really, unsurprisingly.
Gretchen: We’re pretty chatty and also on other platforms like Google Play Music and youtube, if you’re really not a podcast person and SoundCloud. So if you don’t do iTunes don’t worry we’re there too.
[Theme music]
Lauren: So, Gretchen, you were at the Linguistics Society of America annual conference and as part of that the American Dialect Society run their annual Word of the Year vote. They have it at the start of January so it definitely encompasses all of the possible 2016 word-time and it’s a big vote. You have been to the last few and you were there for this one this year, right?
Gretchen: That is correct!
So, we were in a big ballroom in the Marriott in Austin, Texas where the whole conference is being held. If you can picture it, I’m trying to describe this for you, you can picture a big conference ballroom with a couple hundred people in it. I didn’t do a count, there were a lot of them, it was standing room only. Big, packed conference room, probably like for 400, 500 people in this ballroom. And what we do is on Thursday we nominate words for a bunch of different categories for Words of the Year. And then on the Friday night we vote for those categories. There are short, 30 second speeches from the floor in support or against particular words in those categories or to nominate a new thing. And then Friday we also take nominations and vote for the actual final overall word of the year. Sometimes that percolates up from the other categories, sometimes it’s a new candidate, depends on the year.
Lauren: So it’s all kind of a combination of like structure and tradition and kind of free-form chaotic fun.
About Lingthusiasm
A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne.
Weird and deep conversations about the hidden language patterns that you didn't realize you were already making.
New episodes (free!) the third Thursday of the month.
