08: People who make dictionaries

Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne

Science

4.8 • 791 Ratings

🗓️ 18 May 2017

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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). Our latest Patreon bonus is about selling your linguistics skills to employers. (Previous bonuses: swearing and how to teach yourself linguistics.) Go to http://patreon.com/lingthusiasm to check them out! For more information, and links to things mentioned in this episode, visit the show page: http://lingthusiasm.com/post/160811944696/lingthusiasm-episode-8-people-who-make

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Lincathism, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Gretchen McCulloch.
0:21.8	And I'm Lauren Gorn, and today we're going to be talking about how dictionaries get made.
0:26.5	But first, bonus episodes, we have them.
0:29.8	We now have bonus episodes about how to teach yourself even more linguistics,
0:34.1	with our top recommendations for books, videos, and further resources for self-study.
0:39.3	And we also have a bonus episode about swearing.
0:42.3	And this month's bonus on Patreon is about how to sell your awesome linguistic skills to employers.
0:47.3	So you can check out the Patreon at www.pateriorn.com slash linkthusiasm
0:52.3	or just follow the link on linkthusiasm.com to see those bonus
0:55.9	episodes, support the show, and help make linkthusiasm keep growing.
1:08.6	Today we are talking dictionaries, which is a super exciting genre of book for linguists to be interested in.
1:17.5	And this is for a number of reasons.
1:19.5	The first of which is Corey Stamper's new book, Word by Word, came out a couple of months ago,
1:25.3	and we both read it and we had the best fun reading it,
1:28.2	and we wanted to talk about it so much that we ended up just talking about it for this whole
1:32.9	episode. The whole episode will kind of be framed around Corey's book and some of the things
1:37.8	that we really enjoyed about reading it. But that is not the only reason, is it Gretchen?
1:42.2	Yeah, and we're also going to be talking about other stuff to do with dictionaries
1:45.2	because I was recently on a panel about dictionaries at South by Southwest, and I also got
1:51.3	to meet Corey and hang out with some other dictionary people.
1:54.3	When she gave a talk in New York City, I happened to be going down on that specific day.
1:58.0	And so this episode will be another episode in the genre of Gretchen makes Lauren really
	...

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