![]() ![]() “A big difference is beginning with enslaved Black people. “They have ‘A contest in which participants compete to perform the most graceful, dignified, intricate, or amusing walk, usually to music, with a cake as the prize,’ ” Benbow said. Later, Benbow brought up “cakewalk.” All preferred a more nuanced definition than the O.E.D.’s. The father of the do-rag-he calls himself that.” She continued, laughing, “I have to be the one who says, like, ‘Sir, you didn’t invent this!’ ” “I came across this article about the person who thought he ‘invented’ the do-rag, in the seventies. ![]() “We have more than enough evidence that, from the thirties to the sixties, men would use them to hold chemically processed hairdos while they slept,” she said. dates the word to 1964, which Benbow discovered was way too late. “Using ‘be’ to talk about actions that you do continually-‘I be doing this.’ A lot of tweets didn’t understand how that structure worked.”) They were joined by Jennifer Heinmiller, the dictionary’s executive editor and a co-author of the Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English (“doomawhichit,” n., “an object whose name is momentarily not recalled”).įirst up: “do-rag” (n., “a piece of fabric tied closely around the head, originally to protect and maintain a hairstyle (especially one that is chemically processed) and later as part of an individual’s fashion”). (“One example is what linguists call ‘habitual ‘be,’ ” Jenkins said. (Sample episode: “Defund the Grammar Police.”) Jenkins did graduate work at the University of South Carolina that used language and syntax to identify Twitter accounts falsely purporting to be run by Black users. ![]() Benbow had produced the Black Language Podcast, about slang terms, grammar, and linguistics. ![]() The project’s three linguists met recently to compare notes.Īmong the team were Anansa Benbow and Bianca Jenkins. The group would be revising definitions and seeking evidence that words had appeared earlier than the O.E.D. Also reduplicated as ‘cray cray’ ”) and “shade” (n., 1990, “contempt, disapproval, or disrespect, especially when expressed obliquely”). (It’s almost certainly the first dictionary whose editors regularly consult Black Twitter.) Oxford provided nearly twelve hundred existing entries for words that may have originated in African American English, such as “cray” (adj., 2006, “crazy. No Scriptorium this time, but they have been using archives, language databases, other dictionaries, slave narratives, novels, the popular press, and social media. Last summer, a team of linguists and lexicographers from Oxford and researchers from Harvard began a new project, the Oxford Dictionary of African American English. James Murray, the Scottish philologist who left school at fourteen and, in 1879, began to assemble what would become the O.E.D., housed some two million quotations and draft entries in a metal shed he called the Scriptorium. Along with definitions, it includes evidence of a word’s origins and notes how its usage and meaning have changed over time. Tremendous thanks and appreciation to all of you.The Oxford English Dictionary is what’s called a historical dictionary. Since this dictionary went up, it has benefited from the suggestions of dozens of people I have never met, from around the world. The basic sources of this work are Weekley's "An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English," Klein's "A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language," "Oxford English Dictionary" (second edition), "Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology," Holthausen's "Etymologisches Wörterbuch der Englischen Sprache," and Kipfer and Chapman's "Dictionary of American Slang." A full list of print sources used in this compilation can be found here. This should be taken as approximate, especially before about 1700, since a word may have been used in conversation for hundreds of years before it turns up in a manuscript that has had the good fortune to survive the centuries. The dates beside a word indicate the earliest year for which there is a surviving written record of that word (in English, unless otherwise indicated). Etymologies are not definitions they're explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago. This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English. ![]()
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