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A Life in Lexicography: Allen Walker Read TV t Richard W. Bailey 1Wo years ago, our Society began what I hope will be a continuing tradition: the presidential address carrying the tide "A Life in Lexicography." As Joan Hall explained then, at our dinner at Greenfield Village , this title is modeled on the annual lecture given to the delegates and friends of the American Council of Learned Societies: "A Life of Learning." As those who have attended know, some person of eminence presents a fifty minute autobiography, often involving miraculous discoveries in archives or in the deepjungles of anthropology. Our tradition is rather different. Ours is a smaller-scale society and this is a smaller-scale address. So I promise not to keep you anything like so long. Since we have almost no established tradition for this lecture — this is only the second occasion of it — I have viewed our obligatory title as permitting both autobiography and biography, and you will not be obliged to learn of my first dictionary, the American College Dictionary I received as a prize in the district contest for ex tempore speaking when I was in the tenth grade. Embossed on the cover was my name in gold leaf, spelled wrong. Or, rather, you will be obliged to learn that disappointing fact, but the autobiography stops here. Instead, I want to talk about our late fellow and founder member : Allen Walker Read. Allen was there in Terre Haute when we planned the Dictionary Society, and he was a faithful member and a contributor to our journal. Those of you who are members of the American Dialect Society received last year a volume of Allen's, titled Dictionaries:Journal oftheDictionary Society ofNorth America 24 (2003) 180Richard W. Bailey Milestones in the History ofEnglish in America (2002), and all of us will eventually have the opportunity this year to read one of Allen's papers on lexicography in Dictionaries. You may even have read the biographical sketch I wrote ofAllen in the introduction to Milestones, so I willjust touch the highlights here before moving to the centerpiece of his lexicographical work: TheDictionary ofBriticisms. Allen was born in 1906 in Winnebago, Minnesota, and his centeredness in the American prairie stayed with him all his life. His parents were both college graduates, and his father constituted all (or most of) the science faculty at several small colleges in Minnesota and Iowa. It was a family where learning was valued, and both Allen and his sister MaryJo earned graduate degrees and spent dieir lives as teachers . Graduating precociously from Iowa State Teachers' College, Allen enrolled at the University of Iowa. In 1926, he completed his M. A. thesis , "A Study of Iowa Place-Names," and thus, at age 20, launched a career built on careful scrutiny of the documentary record, an accumulation of evidence in die form of citation slips, and interpretation of that evidence based upon die slips. Of course he was interested in the etymology involving the "good story," though he rightiy regarded these stories as folklore unless there was evidence to support them. It was a point of special pride to him to have tracked die etymology of blizzard 'a violent storm' to the neologizer Lightning Ellis in Estherville, Iowa, and he was happy to have found what remains still the earliest citation of chiropractic in Stone'sDavenport (Iowa) City Directory for 1898. This was an especially precious discovery since, for a word to appear in the Dictionary ofAmerican English (DAE), it needed to be documented prior to 1900. Allen got the word chiropractic injust under the wire. From Iowa, Allen went to the University of Missouri, an institution to which he was always deeply grateful and die repository, now, of most of his voluminous papers. There he became a friend and disciple of Robert L. Ramsey, and, with Ramsey's encouragement, embarked on an ambitious plan to compile a history of Missouri place names. He might have remained in Columbia had not Ramsey and otiiers proposed that he be awarded a Rhodes Scholarship. And so, in 1928, Allen embarked on a longjourney from the prairies toward Oxford. It was a heady time to be in Oxford...

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