DARE digital now available!!!!

The subject says it all. Check here.

DARE goes digital

Big news from Wisconsin:  The Dictionary of American Regional English is not only going digital this year, but there's a chance for you to join the fun as a beta tester. Just go here to sign up.

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?

On beyond Zebra!

Finally, the answer to a question I've been afraid to ask out loud ...

Congrats to DARE!

The French having fun with their language!?!?!?

Oui, cher amis, c'est vrai ça, as they say.

Last summer, the latest edition of the classic French dictionary Le Petit Larousse contained a contest. As described briefly in the graphic here (cliquez à embigger, could we say?), they slipped in a couple of fake words, with a prize of 100,000 € — real money, for the moment at least — going to somebody who finds them.

I love the idea, fun with words in a pretty cool way. But even setting aside that our stereotypes about French views of their language are exactly stereotypes, I wouldn't have particularly expected this from Larousse, which makes it even cooler somehow.

I remain really excited about the culture of superstar lexicographers we have now in the US — Ben Zimmer on NPR just yesterday, Michael Paul Adams still a familiar name from his encounters with Colbert and his writings about slang, and Erin McKean (When somebody mentioned her name recently, a young person all but screamed 'Oh. My. God. I LOVE her.)* And the press about the new American Heritage Dictionary is cool (like this podcast, though I'm growing weary of the little thing about the end of print dictionaries.)


Oh yeah, so, I finally got around to checking the answers today ...

HYPERGRIPHE
et
AU JET

* Ha. Did you even notice that I didn't mention the superstar of all superstar dictionary-related things in the whole universe? Because I knew you'd think of DARE instantly anyway.