Memoirs of the Dictionary Society of North America to Celebrate the 25th Anniversary of Dictionaries:

Memoirs of the Dictionary Society of North America to Celebrate the 25th Anniversary of Dictionaries The Beginnings of the Dictionary Society Edward Gates W re started the Dictionary Society at a conference held at Indiana State University in May 1975 to publicize the newly acquired Cordell Collection of Old and Rare Dictionaries. One might say it was a consequence of a flash flood that occurred in Highland Park, Illinois, in 1969. One thing led to another. Warren N. Cordell, Vice-President and Chief Statistical Officer of the A. C. Nielsen Company of Chicago, a leading market research organization, had been collecting rare old dictionaries and kept them in his basement library. The flash flood damaged some, and he decided they should have a safer home. About a year later, he gave them to his alma mater, Indiana State University, and expressed the hope that the university , besides providing a home where they would be safe and could be used by scholars, would offer courses in lexicography to complement the collection. Dr. George Smock, Chairman of the English Department , undertook to start a masters program in lexicography and looked for a qualified teacher. I had enjoyed work (1956-1962) as a definer at the G. & C. Merriam Company in Springfield, Massachusetts, and then obtained a doctorate in linguistics. Fred Cassidy put us in touch with each other, and, from 1970 until I retired in 1989, 1 taught at Indiana State. In 1971 and 1975, Dr. Smock asked me to organize conferences to make the collection known to the scholarly world. As I was preparing Dictionaries:Journal oftheDictionary Society ofNorth America 25 (2004) 25th Anniversary of Dictionaries1 49 for the 1975 conference, I reported on progress to the department's Linguistics Committee. A colleague, Dr. Berta Grattan Lee, asked, "Are you going to start a society for lexicography?" That sounded like a promising idea, and I wrote to several people who had registered to come, asking what they thought. One was ProfessorJames Rosier, Professor of English Philology at the University of Pennsylvania. He wrote back that he had been thinking along the same line.1 When he came, he, Paul Koda (head of the university library's Department of Rare Books and Special Collections) , and I drew up a proposal. I scheduled a special session of the conference to consider it, Rosier made the motion , and the group present voted unanimously to establish what Rosier had tentatively named The Society for the Study of Dictionaries and Lexicography. The Society's administrative base was to be at Indiana State University, with Gates as executive, and Gates and three other university people as a Constitution Committee and de facto Executive Board: Koda, EfBe Hunt (Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences), and Donald Hobar (Associate Professor of English, who had been drafted by Dr. Smock to help with the conferences and who continued to share in the administration of the Society until almost the end of its stay at the University) . Koda shortly moved to another university. The rest of us set to work on the Society's constitution. We polled the twenty-five founding members with options for the Society's name and scope and 'Several developments in the seven years preceding 1975 created a setting among scholars conducive to the establishment of the Society. At a session of the Present-Day English Section of the Modern Language Association in 1968, James Sledd proposed calling an international conference on lexicography in English and creating a center or centers for language data utilizing current technology and available to lexicographers. A committee was appointed to implement these goals, consisting of Raven McDavid, Frederic Cassidy, Audrey Duckert, James Sledd, and Allen Walker Read. The committee was planning the conference when it attended the conference at Indiana State University in 1971. The International Conference on Lexicography in English, sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences, was held on 5-7 June 1972. Its proceedings , titled Lexicography in English, were edited by Raven I. McDavid, who chaired the conference, and Audrey R. Duckert and published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (1973). These events made establishing a lexicographic society a natural development. The...