Lugubrious, Eldritch, Ichorous News: Oxford English Dictionary May Go Out of Print
James Poulos, Ed. ·
Aug 29, 2010 at 12:33pm
I love the internet. I work on the internet. To some of my friends, I only really exist on the internet. But all the internet in the world is not worth the death of the print edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Please, Oxford University Press. Don't stop the presses. As for the rest of the universe: please, don't tell me I'm alone on this one.
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May '10
Re: Lugubrious, Eldritch, Ichorous News: Oxford English Dictionary May Go Out of Print
Do you get your baseball scores via telegraph?
Jul '10
Re: Lugubrious, Eldritch, Ichorous News: Oxford English Dictionary May Go Out of Print
Yale University has a fascinating symposium on iTunes U, celebrating the 80th anniversary of the OED. It runs an hour-and-a quarter or so, and in the course of it, someone mentions in passing that the next edition of the OED (paraphrasing) "may or may not be issued in a print edition". When I heard that, I must admit, my stomach kind of flipped over. I mean, I get it: compared to online, printed dictionaries are cumbersome, slow, and never there when you need them. But come on. Does everything now have to be compared to its electronic equivalent and on terms that inevitably favor the latter? I've got to believe there's still a market for a printed compendium of our endlessly absorbing, maddening, hilarious, frustrating, glorious mother tongue.
May '10
Re: Lugubrious, Eldritch, Ichorous News: Oxford English Dictionary May Go Out of Print
I'm certainly not with you. Some time ago they moved the whole OED onto an SGML content management system, and now they can publish it in all sorts of different ways, not just paper or a web-based version of paper. I always dreamed of buying the full OED and browsing it - but my county library subscription gives me online access from home, and I'm more likely to browse through the dictionary that way. Keeping the focus on the printed edition means having a release schedule that is governed entirely by the commercial viability of selling replacement copies, not by keeping pace with the language. Furthermore, the soft edition has no great need to purge entries in order to keep the volumes down to size - obsolete terms can accumulate, building a more complete history of the language.
Aug '10
Re: Lugubrious, Eldritch, Ichorous News: Oxford English Dictionary May Go Out of Print
Hmm... On the one hand, I don't know what my childhood would have been like without several dictionaries and two sets of encyclopedias... It's still easier to drag a book to the dinner table to answer a question or settle a dispute than it is to go running off to the computer -- or to risk spilling food on some miniature electronic gadget, if we had them.
On the other hand, since college, I've never had to use a non-online English dictionary, and I've done just fine -- slightly better, even, for some of the reasons Robert pointed out.
I'm truly and deeply ambivalent.
Jul '10
Re: Lugubrious, Eldritch, Ichorous News: Oxford English Dictionary May Go Out of Print
I use online dictionaries all the time, and, having done so, I wouldn't ever want to be without them. But the experiences are not the same. Searching an online source is like searching in a dark room with a flashlight. You can find what you're looking for, you may stumble across something else, but you'll miss a lot. Searching the printed OED is like throwing up all the shades and switching on all the lights. Everything is arrayed before you in all its splendor, and you'll discover treasures you didn't even know existed.
Edited on Aug 29, 2010 at 6:21pmMay '10
Re: Lugubrious, Eldritch, Ichorous News: Oxford English Dictionary May Go Out of Print
I think the key point is that the OED is more than just a dictionary, and the OED online is more than just an online dictionary. Let me look up James's first word:
lugubrious, a
1601 DENT Pathw. Heaven (1831) 305 The sea shall roar and make a noise in most doleful and lugubrious manner. 1639 HAMMOND Pastors Motto Wks. 1684 IV. 546 To act no passionate, lugubrious, tragical part. 1792 M. WOLSTONCRAFTE Rights Wom. vi. 267 The severe graces of Virtue must have a lugubrious appearance to them. 1847 LEWES Hist. Philos. (1867) II. 567 A grotesque and lugubrious farce was played on the day of his quitting the establishment. 1877 BLACK Green Past. xxi. (1878) 173 The enforced silence of the room was rather a painful and lugubrious business. 1900 Q. Rev. July 113 The lugubrious fresco in the Campo Santo at Pisa.
But then I can click on DENT (not linked on Ricochet), and find
Dent, Arthur: The plaine mans path-way to heaven 1601 (1603)
[rest of post moves to next posting]
May '10
Re: Lugubrious, Eldritch, Ichorous News: Oxford English Dictionary May Go Out of Print
When I cut and pasted the term, I lost the definition:
Characterized by, expressing or causing mourning; doleful, mournful, sorrowful.
So we learn that the first citation that the OED editors know of for Lugubrious is in this interestingly named book of 1601. Online, one could link to the Gutenburg text of the book, though they haven't done that yet. They could produce alternative publication based on a view entered via the bibliography.
One could link directly to mournful, doleful, or sorrowful, thereby automatically creating a thesaurus of synonyms. It would not be beyond the wit of man to incorporate a list of antonyms to expand the thesaurus, and then expand the list while editing and reviewing over time. Getting off paper is what opens all these possibilities. I still buy books on paper, and I have no iPad or Kindle, but this is an area where I think abandoning paper will truly be liberating.
Re: Lugubrious, Eldritch, Ichorous News: Oxford English Dictionary May Go Out of Print
James, as much as I like flipping through the dictionary, I actually prefer the online OED. A word search will bring up not only the primary definition of a word, but it will also tell you where that word appears in definitions of other words, which can sometimes be incredibly useful. You can also browse, just as you would the print version. I've been a subscriber for years. My only quibble is that the subscription is too expensive, but maybe if they don't have to subsidize the print version they can reduce the online rate. Maybe.
May '10
Re: Lugubrious, Eldritch, Ichorous News: Oxford English Dictionary May Go Out of Print
As long as someone is making a good dictionary for when the power goes out, I say let it die.
Re: Lugubrious, Eldritch, Ichorous News: Oxford English Dictionary May Go Out of Print
To be clear, I welcome our new digital dictionary overlords. It's true, Robert, that the potential for smooth, intuitive knowledge-seeking in the online format is profound, and the online document is an even greater and more useful labor. What bothers me is the coldly utilitarian justification for letting the print version wink out of existence: not enough people will buy it to justify the cost. Well, the Oxford English Dictionary is not exactly a masterpiece of utility. It is a beautiful and unwieldy behemoth that sets all but the stoutest bookshelves groaning. Books are sometimes tools, but they are not only tools, and to treat them that way out of instinct or reflex is to lead us down a path ribboned with online enrichment but stripped of no mean portion of its cultural richness.
And all this is leaves aside Peter Christofferson's essential point -- that print books are not simply of value because they can be beautiful to read or behold on a shelf. They present information in a different -- and, it turns out, particularly powerful -- way. Shrugging off that presentation and its benefits is something that should be done with great care. Unfortunately, it's not.