181. Cairns

The Allusionist

Helen Zaltzman

Arts, Education, Words, Linguistics, History, Entertainment, Helen Zaltzman, Etymology, Society & Culture

4.7 • 3.8K Ratings

🗓️ 13 September 2023

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There's an abiding myth that the landmark dictionaries are the work of one man, in a dusty paper-filled garrett tirelessly working away singlehandedly. But really it took a village: behind every Big Daddy of Lexicography was usually a team of women, keeping the garrett clean, organising the piles of papers, reading through all the citations, doing research, writing definitions, editing, subediting...essentially being lexicographers, without the credit or the pay. Academic Lindsay Rose Russell, author of Women and Dictionary-Making, talks about the roles of women in lexicography: enabling male lexicographers to get the job done, but also making their own dictionaries, and challenging the very paradigms of dictionaries.

Find out more about this episode and the topics therein, and obtain the transcript, at theallusionist.org/cairns.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The Illusionist, in which I, Helen Zoltzman, try to find the puncture repair kit
0:08.6	because language rang a leak.
0:11.2	Today's episode is another one, with someone I met at this year's Dictionary Society
0:14.6	of North America Conference, or Dick Conn, as a friend insisted on calling it.
0:20.3	This episode concentrates on some English language dictionary history, but I am very keen
0:25.0	to know about lexocography and other languages and other cultures if you have any appetite
0:29.4	to tell me about it, on with the show.
0:39.0	It is kind of wild to think that we could take one component of the language that is words
0:46.4	and their meanings, which language is more than that, language is both the lexicon and the grammar
0:53.4	how we string those words together, and then also how we convey those words vocally
0:58.4	written in sign and so on and so forth.
1:01.8	So it's wild that we would take just the words and talk about what they mean in a way that
1:08.9	was universal and shared, because that's not actually how the language works.
1:15.6	And in fact, this was a very odd idea when people first started doing it.
1:19.8	John Floreo made a dictionary of English and Italian, where he said, I know y'all are
1:26.7	going to think I'm nuts for trying to do this, but I'm going to tell you just the words,
1:33.3	even though words are women and sentences and full grammar is a man.
1:39.9	Yes, those are the genders.
1:43.8	So the idea that we could just have a dictionary that's only words is already a little bit wild
1:48.5	in terms of how language works.
1:51.3	I'm coming off as a total dictionary hater, but no one thinks so.
1:56.3	I mean, you wouldn't have dedicated your life to these topics if you disliked them of me.
	...

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