Quotation Paragraphs in Specialized Glossaries on Historical Principles

Quotation Paragraphs in Specialized Glossaries on Historical Principles Michael Adams Indiana University Anyone who prepares a specialized glossary on historical principles will consider what purposes quotation paragraphs in such a glossary serve. Eventually, the audior of such a glossary will have to compile those paragraphs, and, as A.J. Aitken has argued, those paragraphs are the fundamental component of any historical dictionary. Indeed, diough users often think of definitions as primary, "definitions remain subservient to the citations diemselves," because "dieir function is simply to identify separate sets of citations; more specifically, they serve as finding-aids or sign-posts to particular sections of a long entry, [and] they specify the criteria which distinguish one division of citations from one another" (Aitken 1973a, 259). The audior of a historical glossary should be able to justify the selection of quotations according to some mixture of principle and praxis, though die principles, at least, may prove elusive. I have this problem in mind because, when I was writing Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon (2003), I realized that determining the role of quotation paragraphs was really to determine the scope, purpose, and value of the work. Quotation paragraphs in Slayer Slangbear a somewhat heavier burden than is typical of dictionaries organized on historical principles. The strain of pulling along more information than might at first glance seem desirable or even useful was unavoidable were I to satisfy the book's several purposes and audiences. Those who write full-scale historical dictionaries do not encounter this problem: from a thousand quotations, diey choose die minimal set mat Dictionaries:Journal oftheDictionary Soaety ofNorth America 27 (2006), 155-161 156Michael Adams fully illustrates a word's meaning and linguistic (sometimes also extralinguistic ) characteristics. One who compiles a glossary of fairly narrow scope will have to ask how often and how deep to plumb the resources of the whole language in order to make sense of the specialized vocabulary in question. Slayer slang includes a much that deviates from general American English adverbial much; the form is relatively frequent in slayer slang and is a hallmark of slayer style, but it did not originate with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, nor do all of its important developments first occur in Buffy context . If you trip while walking with a sarcastic friend, the friend might ask, "Walk much?" This VERB + much pattern is not the one mainly at issue in slayer slang; radier, adjective + much and noun + much are the emerging slang forms, as in "Pathetic much?" and "Broken record much?" No one has yet found an instance of adjective + much prior to the film Heathers (1989), but it was used between that film and die first season of Buffy (1997). No one has yet found noun + much before 1998, when it appeared in Mademoiselle and die filmJawbreaker. The quotation paragraph for the Slayer Slang entry much includes forty-four items ranging in date from 1992 (the release of die film Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and 26July 2002 (the day on which I stopped collecting material for Slayer Slang). Nine quotations are taken from the film or television series (one of these comes from the spin-off series, Angel, in which it is spoken by the same character who typically uses slayer slang much in Buffy) ; eleven quotations are culled from Buffy novels , as well as books and magazine articles about the show; thirteen occurred on the official Buffy posting board or in other Buffy related chat rooms. Thus three quarters of the quotations plausibly illustrate slayer slang, or language of the Buffyverse — the universe of all tilings Buffy. The remaining ten quotations, however, are taken from sources entirely unrelated to the Buffy text or text that consciously imitates Buffyspeak, and therein lies the problem: how does one know which non-Buffy quotations are important additions to die much quotation paragraph, or, by analogy, any non-X quotations to a quotation paragraph in any X-glossary complied on historical principles? SlayerSlangis the first philological treatment of a television show. Obviously, it appeals to fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, scholarly or otiierwise , but the range of interests is rather large and elements of it incompatible . Fans who...