Defining Moments

Joe & I met Steve Kleinedler at the recent DARE bash.  Had to look him up to describe him accurately; here's what I got:

He is currently the executive editor of the dictionaries group at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's trade and reference division and the supervising editor of the new American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition.

Steve pointed us to a great article by Carrie Kilman* called Defining Moments, which appeared in Teaching Tolerance (which by the way is a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization worth supporting!).  The article describes research that Teaching Tolerance did, looking at the content of eight children's dictionaries, and then their discovery that the 2009 American Heritage Children's Dictionary had been updated to reflect actual usage that children would encounter.  So for example, if you tell a bunch of today's kids that gay means 'cheerful, merry', they're going to conclude that dictionaries are stupid.  It sounds like they did a really thorough, thoughtful job.  Good article.  Read it.

* Who by the way is based in Madison, WI.  But then, aren't all the important people?