26 August 2011
Mercifully, this piece from the Toronto Star is short. I’d hate to see the train wreck if it had been longer. The article is about the University of Toronto’s Dictionary of Old English Project.
Leaving aside the use of “believe” in the article, which is nothing short of ridiculous, missing commas and other grammatical flaws render the article difficult to read. And the reporter concludes with an incomplete and cryptic reference to some kind of fundraising challenge. It’s better to leave things like this out entirely than include them without the context required to decipher what is meant.
Worst of all, the article is about a scholarly and meticulously researched dictionary, but when it comes to providing examples of Old English terms, the reporter uses an anonymous web site as his source. I’m sure the DOE staff would have happily given him access to the dictionary (which is available on a paying subscriber basis) so he could quote from the dictionary he is writing about.
And that list of supposed Old English words contains several that are not Old English. Nary is an eighteenth-century word, nowhere near Old English. I have no idea what pudh is supposed to be, but it’s not Old English. Forsooth is a more modern spelling; if you’re talking about the Old English form it should be for soth. (I’ll forgive the reporter for changing thorns to th, although it would have been a neat touch to include the archaic letter forms. The newspaper’s typeface probably supports it. Most fonts do.) And wrought is also a modern spelling; the Old English verb is wyrcan “to work.”
I was also amazed to learn from the article that the DOE is available on microfiche. Of course, it isn’t. An older version was once made available on that medium, but no one in their right mind still publishes on microfiche.
And newspapers wonder why their readership is declining.
(Hat tip: Jesse Sheidlower’s Twitter feed.)
Disclaimer: I am a PhD student in the Department of English at U of T, but I am not associated with the DOE project.
