Among the New Words as an Editing Project in a Methods of Research Class

Among the New Words as an Editing Project in a Methods of Research Class Wayne Glowka, Keith C. Hendrix, Brenda K. Lester, Elijah Scott, andJohn M. Sirmans A Short History of Among the New Words According to information available inJohn Algeo and Adele Algeo's Fifty Years Among the New Words (1991b) and a history of the column they published in American Speech (1991a), "Among the New Words" began as a feature called "The Living Language." This column was edited by Dwight Bolinger and published in I. Omar Colodny's Words from 1937 to 1941 (Algeo and Algeo 1991a, 71). In 1941, Bolinger began publishing the column as "Among the New Words" in American Speech. However, Bolinger took a leave of absence in early 1941 to teach in Costa Rica, and editors of the journal would have withdrawn the column if Allen Walker Read had not covered for Bolinger until his return (Algeo and Algeo 1991a, 78). Bolinger's last installment was published in February 1944. The editorship of "Among the New Words" then passed to I. Willis Russell, who edited the column for forty-two years, from February 1944 to his death on February 12, 1985. Russell was assisted by Woodrow W. Boyette from 1957 to 1959 and by associate editor Mary Gray Porter from 1971 until Russell's death (Algeo and Algeo 1991a, 71-72), after which Porter submitted Russell's last installment. There were no installments for 1986, but Porter worked with John Algeo on his first installment for fall 1987. John Algeo, with the assistance ofAdele Algeo, edited the column until 1997, producing exactly forty installments in ten years. John Algeo Dictionaries:fournal ofthe Dictionary Society ofAmerica 21 (2000) Among the New Words as an Editing Project101 commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of "Among the New Words" by reproducing the 113 installments of the column, those dating from April 1941 to winter 1990, in one volume, Fifty Years Among the New Words. About a year before the Algeos retired, Connie EbIe, the current editor of American Speech, offered the editorship of "Among the New Words" to Wayne Glowka of Georgia College & State University, who accepted the job with the proviso that the American Dialect Society help fund a student assistant. Glowka has regularly employed at least one graduate assistant for each installment published during his tenure and has made the production of the column a project in both graduate and undergraduate classes. Brenda K. Lester The Goals and Objectives of Among the New Words as an Editing Project I suspected from the beginning of my negotiations with Connie EbIe and American Dialect Society Executive Secretary Allan Metcalf that I could never keep up with this lexicographical project without a good deal of help from someone. My personal visit with the Algeos confirmed that suspicion when they wearily warned me of how much work was actually involved in filing citations, checking all of the selected words in the dictionaries of record,1 and then typing up and proofreading citations with a quarterly deadline. When our actual editing term began, I soon saw that there was absolutely more work than a graduate student and I could ever manage. To my first rescue, however, came a class in methods of research offered in our new graduate program in English. To my mind, the ultimate purpose of such a 1To determine if a term was "new" when we began the project, we consulted the index inJohn Algeo's Fifty Years Among the New Words (1991, 21-83), an unpublished index compiled by John and Adele Algeo for columns of "Among the New Words" published after Fifty Years, the index of our own published words, and the following "dictionaries of record": Addenda Section 1993: A Supplement to Webster's Third New International Dictionary, The American Heritage Talking Dictionary for Madntosh, Cambridge International Dictionary ofEnglish, Merriam -Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (10th edition), The Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edition), Random House Webster's College Dictionary, Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (CD-ROM version 2.0), Webster's New World College Dictionary , and Webster's Third New InternationalDictionary oftheEnglish Language. Since that time, we have added two new works: The Barnhart New Words Concordance and...