Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography (review)

260Reviews Dictionaries: TheArt and Craft ofLexicography. Second edition. Sidney I. Landau. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP. 2001 . Pp. xvi + 477. $85; $30 paper. Like many readers of this journal, I consulted Landau's Dictionaries time and again after reading it initially in the 1984 Scribner's (and subsequent Cambridge University Press) edition. The second edition makes abundantiy clear how dramatic and significant on the lexicographer's calendar the intervening decades have been. Structurally, intellectually, and stylistically, the first (1/e) and second (2/e) editions display comparable virtues. But the new edition is a richer book, the contents of all chapters revised, some containing significant new material, the final chapter transformed from its original "miscellany" into a treatment of legal and ethical issues in lexicography, and a major new treatment of corpus lexicography added as a separate chapter. For dictionary fans and others wanting to learn about the making of dictionaries and the workaday challenges a lexicographer faces, Dictionaries 2/e provides an informative up-to-date read and definitively displaces Dictionaries 1/e. In 2/e, Dictionaries has grown by a hundred pages, more than twothirds of them devoted to the new chapter on corpora. This chapter highlights the most significant advance in lexicography since 1984 and points to potential advances in dictionaries to come — but only, as Landau stresses, if publishers invest in significant corpus building and maintenance. With notable success, corpora have been used in British dictionaries and, to a far lesser extent, U.S. ones. (In the great tradition of flatulent marketing of dictionaries, some claim to have used corpora, with little but claim to show for it.) Again to a far greater degree in Britain than in the U.S., commercial publishers have banded together (sometimes with universities or university presses) to create corpora upon which to base a realistic lexicography. For their reluctance to invest in the future, Landau scores American dictionary publishers and laments the shortsighted ways of the conglomerates that own them. Recent years have seen a bounty of books treating lexicography, including Jonathon Green's popular Chasing the Sun (1996) and Henri Béjoint's weighty Modern Lexicography (2000), dubiously subtitled An Introduction, to namejust two. Landau's book is particularly attentive to the processes of making a dictionary (from establishing the word list to discriminating word senses and writing the definitions) and the attendant practical concerns (dictionary design, the timely ordering of paper for production, fringe benefits for staff, the ill effects of corporate misperception of the special demands of lexicography ) . He focuses on English-language dictionaries and might fairly have incorporated the word English into his title or subtitle. In the recent spectrum of scholarly analyses, Dictionaries 2/e is well balanced, with a lighter style, and with clear, direct, forthright observations and assessments. It is also engagingly personal: at one point, Landau calls the Cambridge Dictionary ofAmerican Eng- Reviews261 lish "my dictionary" (317), and the phrase has an inviting ring to it. In his critique of others' dictionaries, he seldom pulls his punches, though the author of 2/e is a gender critic than the author of 1/e, as he recognizes. In preparing this revision, Landau typed the entire manuscript of Dictionaries 1/e himself — thus ensuring occasion to reconsider each word. The new edition contains a good deal that has been rearranged or rewritten, and not much in the first edition appears to have been omitted. Some readers may share my regret diat 2/e omits the letter Landau wrote to two university students who had inquired about the origin of the f-word. His 1984 reply distinguished between the "unattested" word the students had asked about and the abundantly attested f**k, with its internal ink blotches. His answer remains witty, despite the fact that ink-blotched f**k is less well attested these days and the word of interest to the students now abundandy attested. Dictionaries 2/e maintains basically the same contents and ordering of chapters as in 1/e: (1) "What is a dictionary?" (2) "A brief history of English lexicography," (3) "Key elements of dictionaries and other language references ," (4) "Definition," (5) "Usage," (6) "The corpus in lexicography," (7) "Dictionary...