Hardcore dictionaries
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On 6/10/2008, the Fox & friends crew discussed viewer response to a piece on spelling reform:
| Gretchen Carlson: | Uh this one was "Teach children how to use a dictionary; that is how they will learn … |
| Steve Doocy: | Yeah. |
| Gretchen Carlson: | … to spell!" But here's the problem: do they even sell hardcore dictionaries anymore, or … |
| Steve Doocy: | Sure! |
| Gretchen Carlson: | … is it all in the computer? Do they? |
| Steve Doocy: | Yeah, or sit next to a (([unintelligible])) |
| Gretchen Carlson: | I'm glad to know that! |
Please hold the blonde jokes: despite her somewhat air-headed self-presentation, Gretchen Carlson graduated with honors from Stanford in 1990, and "has also studied at Oxford University". And of course, Ms. Carlson meant to say "hard copy", or perhaps "hard cover", but came out with "hardcore" instead, in the the sort of lexical substitution that could happen to any of us.
In any case, I'm happy to say that there are some excellent hardcore dictionaries still in print. For example, Allen Walker Read, Lexical Evidence from Epigraphy in Western North America: A Glossarial Study of the Low Element in the English Vocabulary, originally published in 75 copies in Paris in 1935, was republished in 1977 as Classic American Graffiti, and is still available for $7.50 from Maledicta Press.
According to a review by William Bright (Language, 55(2): 496-497, 1979:
The manuscript was first declined by a German scholarly editor because it discussed such 'furchtbare Tatsachen', but was eventually printed privately, with this proviso on the title page: 'Circulation restricted to students of linguistics, folk-lore, abnormal psychology, and allied branches of the social sciences.' In his preface, Read warned that, 'Judged merely as reading matter, the following work … is abominably, incredibly obscene'; but he affirmed his belief that 'no emanation of the human spirit is too vile or too despicable to come under the record and analysis of the scientist'. The original edition was favorably reviewed in Language by R.G. Kent (11.166, 1935).
This is the sort of book that used to be kept in special locked sections of research libraries, but I don't think that there's much in it that couldn't now be read out loud on cable TV shows like The Wire. And it documents "graffiti collected, especially from public lavatories, 'in the course of an extensive sight-seeing trip throughout the western United States and Canada in the summer of 1928", so none of these "emanations of the human spirit" are likely to be news to many American adults.
[Update 6/19/2008 — Ammon Shea has much more to say about "Hardcore Dictionaries" at OUPblog.]
Moira Less said,
June 13, 2008 @ 5:54 am
'Judged merely as reading matter, the following work … is abominably, incredibly obscene'
It's too bad that there's nothing today that could be described similarly with such relish.
Michael F said,
June 13, 2008 @ 6:01 am
I believe he's saying "…or sit next to a smart kid."
Though I am not certain.
Michael
Tom said,
June 13, 2008 @ 6:18 am
I don't think 'hardcore' was necessarily a mistake in her sentence.
It's commonly used in the sense of 'serious', often implying something is challenging, e.g. "Punishment Park is a good film but it's pretty hardcore." or "Jim just thrashed me at tennis. It was hardcore."
The meaning I took initially from her remark is "Do they sell 'proper' dictionaries like the OED rather than just illustrated My First Dictionaries of Whatever?"
That's problematic in itself, of course, and an adjective meaning 'physically concrete' (hey, concrete and hardcore are both construction materials…) would make more sense.
Timothy M said,
June 13, 2008 @ 7:02 am
I agree with Tom that while 'hardcore' could have been a slip, there isn't much reason to think so. She didn't stumble over it, or try to correct herself afterwards – and it makes perfect sense to me.
My idea for why she phrased her sentence that way is a little different from Tom's idea though. To me, her sentence conveys the opinion that "using an actual paper dictionary is hardcore," and at the same time asks the question, "do they even make paper dictionaries anymore?" Normally conveying both of those would take two sentences, but by modifying "dictionary" with "hardcore," one can accomplish both at one time – sure, it's a questionable way of stating something and I'd never use it in formal writing, but it seems to me this kind of thing happens a lot in conversation.
john riemann soong said,
June 13, 2008 @ 7:10 am
Does it fall under the scope of linguistics — the study of that idea that what is printed on paper is somehow more authoritative than what is found online by virtue of the medium itself? Because it seems to me that what she is implying is that what is on hard-copy is more hardcore/"dedicated".
(On the other hand, graduating from Stanford with honors on top of being a classical violinist crowned Miss America does seem to make for an impressive resume — how exactly does an individual like that indulge in vulgar prescriptivism?)
Richard Hershberger said,
June 13, 2008 @ 9:51 am
The point the others have passed over is that, assuming she meant something like "hard copy", the question is simply stupid: it suggests that she hasn't walked into a bookstore in the past decade, or that she believes her audience hasn't. It betrays either ignorance or condescension.
K. said,
June 13, 2008 @ 11:31 am
This was obvious a subtle plug for the new "American Heritage XTREEM Dictionary" set to be released this summer. It's supposed to include "over 90,000 brutal new definitions!!1!." The special limited edition printing will be bound in razor wire and "available only through cage match."
It's a shame how much journalism and advertising blend together these days.
Philip Spaelti said,
June 13, 2008 @ 11:46 am
I suspect that the meaning of "hardcore" here is actually something else, though it kind of fits Tom's idea. I suspect it means using a dictionary (either paper/hard copy or electronic, but the image of a paper dictionary is predominant here) to check one's spelling by hand, as opposed to relying on the built-in spell checker. True conservatives turn the spell checker off (if they can find the setting ;-) and look the words up in their trusty Webster. That would certainly qualify as "hardcore", I think.
Nassira Nicola said,
June 13, 2008 @ 11:54 am
John Riemann Soong: does it fall under the scope of linguistics — the study of that idea that what is printed on paper is somehow more authoritative than what is found online by virtue of the medium itself?
Well, I would argue it falls neatly within the scope of language ideology, which in some people's view is part of linguistics and in some people's view is strictly part of (linguistic) anthropology. So the answer to your question depends for the most part on the definition of linguistics your answerer is working with.
On the other hand, graduating from Stanford with honors on top of being a classical violinist crowned Miss America does seem to make for an impressive resume — how exactly does an individual like that indulge in vulgar prescriptivism?
The same way that being a rather well-educated, pretty intelligent linguist doesn't make me a classical violinist. I imagine that one becomes a Stanford-educated prescriptivist by never having been taught any better. (Apologies to the rockstar linguistics faculty at Stanford, who can't be held responsible for the enlightenment of the entire student body.)
That said, on the video, she doesn't seem all that prescriptivist to me, or even that abominably ignorant. Compare, for your amusement, her colleague, who announced something to the effect of "You can't blame the English language for being too hard to spell! People have been speaking it for thousands of years, and all of a sudden it's too hard?" Because as we all know, speaking=spelling, and English has been written, with the same standardized orthography we have today, since some time before the common era. (This is just begging for an "English was good enough for Jesus" reference.) In any event, although I'm not a big fan of large-scale intentional spelling reforms, I have to say that the two people on the show who opposed them came off looking a lot dumber than she did. Funny how the "dumb blonde" got all the blogospheric coverage.
Karen said,
June 13, 2008 @ 12:16 pm
Of course, using a dictionary is a terrible way to learn to spell. All you can really do is discover that your guess is wrong. Perhaps, if you can come up with more guesses, you'll get there, but if you think "sh" is always spelled "sh", how do you "learn to spell" a word like chandelier by using a dictionary, or pique, or scores of others?
Josh Millard said,
June 13, 2008 @ 12:26 pm
I'm glad to see folks defending the flexibile utility of "hardcore", but Gretchen pretty clearly presents "hardcore dictionaries" as being opposed to it all being "in the computer". I don't think the hardcover-vs-wimpy argument against this being a production error flies, unless there's some popular perception that online dictionaries are, like, totally weaksauce.
Josh Millard said,
June 13, 2008 @ 12:28 pm
Scratch the superfluous e on "flexibile" and make that "harcore-vs-wimpy". I'll be looking in the den, looking at the pictures in My First Cambridge Grammar.
Nassira Nicola said,
June 13, 2008 @ 1:25 pm
Josh – online dictionaries may not be wimpy, but automatic spell-checking (once one figures out how to make it work, I guess?) certainly is, and I think that's more in line with the idea of spelling being "all in the computer."
Josh Millard said,
June 13, 2008 @ 2:44 pm
Ah, that's a good point, Nassira. Doesn't significantly undercut my doubts about the "hardcore vs. computer-as-toy-dictionary" explanation for Gretchen's comment — I still believe it was a simple slip — but spellcheck features are definitely a reasonable to include in the idea of what "on the computer" could mean, whether it's a passive in-browser spellcheck, an active Spellcheck This Document type feature in a word-processor, or search term suggestions from Google.
And if the version of IE we have at my workplace supported the same passive underlining-an-error functionality that my Firefox at home has, I'd have maybe been spared that flexibile and the followup harcore, yes.
john riemann soong said,
June 13, 2008 @ 3:36 pm
It does seem to have some of the traits of an eggcorn — there is a correlation between the dedicated implied by "hardcore" and the prestige implied by "hardcover/hard-copy".
Ellen K. said,
June 13, 2008 @ 5:18 pm
Nassira Nicola wrote: "Compare, for your amusement, her colleague, who announced something to the effect of "You can't blame the English language for being too hard to spell! People have been speaking it for thousands of years, and all of a sudden it's too hard?" Because as we all know, speaking=spelling, and English has been written, with the same standardized orthography we have today, since some time before the common era."
This reminds me of what I've read about Chinese writing, here at Language Log and on pages linked from here, and the observation that learning to speak Chinese is much easier than learning to write it.
Nathan Myers said,
June 14, 2008 @ 5:37 am
How can you use a dictionary to learn how to spell? Do it the way I did, by reading it. You needn't start at A and proceed to Z; open it anywhere in the middle and see if there are any words on the page that you don't know, or don't know well enough. I always find one or two, even at my age.
A German colleague remarked that it would be impossible to so indulge in her own dictionary; she said a typical German likely would know all the words listed on a random page.
john riemann soong said,
June 14, 2008 @ 10:53 am
Of course, Wiktionary trumps all other dictionaries, because you can switch back and forth between languages.
Well, it would if it had more contributors. :-(
John Cowan said,
June 14, 2008 @ 11:27 am
I am told that in the pre-computer age, Germans who actually needed to make sure their spellings were perfect typically had a single-page list of "commonly misspelled words" in their desk drawers, along with the paper clips and other such things. I'd like to see that list.
Karen said,
June 15, 2008 @ 2:11 am
Nathan, I'd argue that you're using a dictionary to increase your lexicon. A student faced with spelling a word on an assignment probably can't use a hard-copy dictionary to figure out how to spell it, not easily at any rate. A good on-line dictionary, however, will off "chandelier" for "shandeleer" (I just tried it with the on-line Merriam-Webster.
David Marjanović said,
June 15, 2008 @ 10:47 am
A big German dictionary will have a number of technical terms that people outside the respective specialty don't usually know, archaic/poetic words that only well-read people know, and also a few regional words that somehow got counted as standard anyway.
TAR ART RAT said,
June 16, 2008 @ 8:50 am
sweet sweet jesus…
oh, but wait- she DOES have a point "do they even sell hardcore dictionaries anymore?" -right, those "hardcore dictionaries" are really hard to come by. The ones that are just hardcore, really really hardcore.
john riemann soong said,
June 17, 2008 @ 5:04 am
Karen: But then you have could IPA print dictionaries, arranged by phonetic order. (But how would you define that anyway? Close vowels before open ones? Unrounded vowels before rounded ones?) Now that would be truly hardcore. The student only need know how to represent his pronunciation in IPA and boom! He finds the correct spelling.
Of course, you have to deal with different accents. That means as long as we're sticking to hard-corpy (hard-corpy fetishism?) it means publishing different IPA dictionaries for different accents. "A Phonetic Dictionary in IPA for Australian English," perhaps?
Anonymous Cowherd said,
June 18, 2008 @ 1:37 pm
@Moira Less: 'Judged merely as reading matter, the following work … is abominably, incredibly obscene'
It's too bad that there's nothing today that could be described similarly with such relish.
*flourishes*
The Aristocrats!
John Cowan said,
October 20, 2008 @ 1:15 pm
Of course, the truly hardcore dictionary of English is the OED — and the most up-to-date version is available only online, and probably always will be.
JO 753 said,
March 27, 2009 @ 9:04 pm
My favorite news babe talking about my favorite subject and I totally missed it!