Editorial

Editorial No one likes to be late with important work done on behalf of others, and so I am disappointed that this volume of Dictionaries appears as long past its supposed year of publication as the last. No sooner had the 2004 volume been published, than I was already editing my first issue of American Speech, and the two journals have been competing for my time ever since. In March, I accepted a position at Indiana University, and the consequent packing, moving, and unpacking have been further impediments to making up time and bringing Dictionaries out less late than in the previous year. It is with some relief, then, that I relinquish responsibility for the journal. I hope that the quality of the volumes I have edited will compensate the Society some for any damage my lateness has caused. And I am sure that Bill Frawley, with help from Orin Hargraves and others, will quickly recover the schedule I lost. If I leave the journal with relief, I do so without regret: editing Dictionaries has been an altogether wonderful experience. I am grateful for the opportunity to serve the Society and to learn about lexicography and the canons of scholarship from the many authors with whom I've worked, as well as those who reviewed submissions, to all of whom I extend my thanks and best wishes. I owe the greatest debts to Luanne von Schneidemesser and to Vernonia Tyree and those who work for her at Professional Book Compositors : Luanne has monitored my progress or lack of it tactfully, so that I felt the support I needed to balance my editorial frustrations and anxieties; Vernonia and her colleagues have been remarkably patient during the last couple of years, through missed deadlines and ragged production schedules. It is fair to say that the quality of Dictionaries depends on authors, reviewers, compositors, and the Society's administrative officer, and that, except for causing trouble, the editor's role has been incidental. Still, looking over the volumes published during my tenure as editor, I cannot help but feel some pride: they are all excellent collections of the Society's best scholarship. The current volume is no exception . It includes an extensive "commentary" on the first two English glossaries of gay slang, in fact a considerable work of historical lexicography . Its author, Gary Simes, is the editor of the Dictionary of Australian Underworld Slang (OUP, 1993) and is currently working on a large-scale historical dictionary of the language of sex and sexuality in Modern English. The commentary published here is a trove of lexical and social information. Those who read through it will marvel, I think, v¡¡¡Editorial at its bibliographic range but also will appreciate Simes's graceful technique , especially in the selection of quotations. Katherine Connor Martin's article on gender and labeling is an articulate and insightful take on an old lexicographical problem by a new member of the Society. David Micklethwait's practiced bibliographical eye catches an interesting problem in the text of Webster's An American Dictionary of the English Language and provides an elegant solution that sheds light on the War of the Dictionaries. And Monique Cormier, recent recipient of the Urdang/DSNA Award, investigates further the Early Modern history of two-way bilingual English-French lexicography (see her previous article on the subject, written with Aline Francœur, in the 2004 issue of Dictionaries) . All of these are valuable contributions to lexical and lexicographical scholarship—they also make pleasurable reading. It is my pleasure to share them with members of the Society and all others, present and future, interested in matters lexicographical. ...