Words of 1815

1 September 2011

As you undoubtedly know, I’ve been compiling lists of new words for each year of the past century. But novelist Mary Robinette Kowal has done something similar for words from 1815. She’s writing a period novel and wants to keep it free of linguistic anachronisms. Kowal describes her process:

I decided to create a Jane Austen word list, from the complete works of Jane Austen, and use that as my spellcheck dictionary. It flagged any word that she didn’t use, which allowed me to look it up to see if it existed. Sometimes the word did, but meant something different. [...] Once the word was flagged, I looked it up in the OED to double-check the meaning and the earliest citation.  If the word didn’t work, then I used the OED’s historical thesaurus to find a period appropriate synonym. If that wasn’t yielding good results, I would also, sometimes, search in the complete works of Jane Austen to see how she referred to similar subjects.

In a few cases, she decided to keep anachronistic words for artistic or style reasons.

Kowal’s method is an excellent one. It is not doctrinaire, she makes exceptions where it is sensible to do so. She recognizes that words change in meaning. Presumably she shows some flexibility in the date, so a word that appears in the OED from 1817 is probably okay for use in an 1815 setting. Of course, her method will not flag a word that Austen used but has changed in meaning, so it’s not fail-safe. But no single method for eliminating anachronisms is going to be perfect. This is smart use of a dictionary.

Kowal’s blog post contains a list of words she pulled from her latest novel because they were anachronistic, and it contains a link to her Jane Austen word list. They are both well worth a peek.

(Hat tip to Languagehat)

More on False Quotations

30 August 2011

A New York Times op-ed on the subject.

I would go one step further than Mr. Morton, who wrote the NYT piece. The tendency is not limited to bumper stickers, coffee mugs, and t-shirts. Whenever you see a quote attributed to a famous person that is not accompanied by a reference to the date and specific speech or book/article in which it appears, assume that someone made it up and assigned the famous person’s name to it. The assumption will be right more often than it will be wrong.

I believe I’ve mentioned the site before, but The Quote Investigator is an excellent resource.

Are Books Dead?

27 August 2011

The Guardian published this article by Ewan Morrison a few days ago.

What I like best about the article is that it focuses on the economics of publishing, rather than the technology. I agree that the paper book will survive. It will specialize. Certain types of paper books will have sharply reduced print runs and some will disappear altogether, but others, notably the light-entertainment paperback, will continue. 

We may also see a sharper differentiation between what is published by established imprints and what is thrown out on the net for free, the latter being significantly devalued in the public’s eye. Self-published books have been long derided as being of inferior quality. After all, if you couldn’t get a publisher to put it out, then it probably isn’t worth reading.* As the public becomes accustomed to the new digital media and its distribution methods, then they’ll start to discriminate among the new media in the same way.

I also foresee a shortening of the copyright period, or because the media conglomerates have such political power and essentially write the laws themselves, perhaps it won’t shorten, but they’ll lose the argument that that piracy is stealing from the “artist.” As Morrison’s article points out, the artist doesn’t make money from the long tail of the backlist. It is only the corporations that distribute books or have snapped up millions of copyrights that can amass enough income from the long tail to make selling that market worthwhile. Copyright durations like life of the author plus seventy years don’t benefit the artist or encourage creation of new works, they instead benefit those who have played no role whatsoever in creation of new works and actually discourages creation of new works because they focus on remarketing the old. Remember that copyright as we know it is a rather new concept.

But the issue of authorial compensation isn’t new. Shakespeare and other Elizabethan playwrights, for instance, got no royalties from their works. Rights to their plays were sold for relatively small one-time sums. Shakespeare managed to amass a fairly sizable fortune not because he was writer, but because he was also an actor. As an actor he owned shares in the theater companies that owned and produced the works. That’s what made him rich. Most other playwrights of his day barely managed to stay out of debt, if they were lucky. These problems have always plagued the industry, and will continue to do so no matter what economic model is in place.

* (28 August): It has been pointed out that this is a gross generalization. There are high-quality books that don’t attract a publisher because the market for them is too small.

(Hat tip: Jonathan Green’s Twitter feed)

How Not to Write a News Article on Dictionaries

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.