Saturday, December 22, 2007

Great moments in lexicography: Cab Calloway edition

NPR is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Cab Calloway. I must have once known but had forgotten that, among a huge set of other accomplishments, he was a published lexicographer: The New Cab Calloway's Hepsters Dictionary: Language of Jive.

And while we're at it, happy solstice everybody!

3 comments:

hh said...

Happy (belated) Solstice, Mr. Verb!!

Anonymous said...

Happy Belated Solstice to Mr. V (and the Mrs. of course) too!

One thing that I've always wondered about was the relation between 'hepster' (as in Cab's dictionary) and our contemporary 'hipster'. What say you, Mr. V? There's enough /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ merger stuff going on in English to make this an interesting questoin, right? Hypercorrection? Misperception? What do we think? Can you get hep to this? Or are we getting hip to it? What the hell are these crazy kids doing today anyway...

Mr. Verb said...

Thanks, hh and Cassady. Hip versus hep was discussed within the last year on the ADS list and they may have talked about this, but I don't know offhand.