In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

How Much of a Good Thing is too Much? Joan Houston Hall Dictionary of American Regional English W!c ien Volume IV of the Didionary ofAmerican RegionalEnglish (Cassidy and Hall 1985ff.) appeared in 2002, I was occasionally asked how this volume might differ from the first three volumes, published between 1985 and 1996. The answer was easy: it benefitted from the Internet. While the same is true for every contemporary lexicographic effort, for dictionaries with dated quotations the benefits are particularly striking. Even with the limited number of electronic sources available to the DARE staff in the late 1990s1, we were able to gready expand the date ranges for our entries on both ends of the spectrum. We were also often able either to confirm or disprove our hunches about the regional distribution of a particular word or phrase. The word said provides a good example. In our paper files we had three citations for this term, which is a variant of the British dialect word screed, meaning 'a fragment.' All of our citations were from New England, and they all had the sense 'a piece, a bit, a scrap.' They dated from 1914 to 1982. On their own, they would have made an acceptable entry for DARE. But as soon as we gained access to TheMaking ofAmerica, I was able to push the date ofthe first quotation back from 1914 to 1877, then 1869, and finally 1860. Our earliest ventures into electronic research were usually restricted to the two Making ofAmerica sites (http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/index.html, http://www.hti.umich.edu/rn/moagrp), the Library of Congress's American Memory site (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amhome.html) and Google (http://www.google.com). Dictionaries:Journal of theDictionary Society ofNorth America 27 (2006), 149-154 150Joan Houston Hall The three antedatings were all from New England, and they fit our definition well, so they expanded and corroborated our initial evidence very nicely. But our last quotation was still from 1982. 1 was curious about whether the word was still being used in 2000. So I did a Google search on the term and found a couple of interesting examples.2 One was from Pennsylvania, where Susquehanna University's "Web Central" posted the question, "How can one ever hope to find that annoyingly evasive scrid of information. . . in such a large pool of digital information?" How indeed? I didn't have any way of identifying the writer of that question, but although Pennsylvania is not in New England, it seemed close enough not to do too much damage to the clear regional pattern. I could simply change the label from New England to chiefly New England. But the second example was initially disappointing. It was on the web site of a lathe maker who suggested that the best fix to a problem with a casting was to "make a pin that's a scrid longer." Obviously this was our word, but the disappointing thing was that the lathe maker was from Palo Alto, California. I was about to quote him with a California regional label, regretting that my distinct regionalism had spread not just to Pennsylvania but to California, when I decided to send him a quick email message and ask where he had learned the word. Within ten minutes he responded, saying, "I remember exacdy when I first heard it— my girlfriend from Maine used it and I had never heard it before, so I had to ask her about it." With that gratifying bit of news, I solidified chiefly New England as DAREs regional label. The additional time that it took to do this Internet research in 2000 was surelyjustified by the expanded date range and additional evidence for the use and the regionality of the term. But what amount of effort would bejustified today for the same headword search? The question is a very real one for DARE Editors, since the number of valuable digital resources has skyrocketed in the last decade, and we have to make conscious choices to exclude all but those that are most likely to be useful (or perhaps those that are least troublesome to use) . Recently I decided...

pdf

Share