Complete, Consistent, and Deliberate Lexicography

Dictionary of American Regional English, volume 4, P-Sk Chief editor, Joan Houston Hall Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002. Pp. xxi + 1014.

This fourth and most recent volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) replicates the wonderful success of the three preceding volumes (1985, 1991, 1996), the established elegance of complete, consistent, and deliberate lexicography. As a living text, it also records change, not only among pronunciations, words, and phrases, but also among people, including the most important person who will ever be associated with the dictionary. The DARE4staff page concludes:

IN MEMORIAM
Frederic G. Cassidy
1907-2000
Creator, heart, and soul of the Dictionary of American Regional English
Chief Editor, 1962-2000

"And thou in this shall find thy monument,
When tyrants' crest and tombs of brass are spent."

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 107

The page also identifies Joan Houston Hall as chief editor, the perfect choice to sustain the excellence of editorial leadership and to complete the most important work ever undertaken in this field of American speech.

With that said, this report concentrates on the adjectives modifying lexicography in the noun phrase at the outset—complete, consistent, and deliberate. These reflect the comprehensiveness of DARE as a historical dictionary, its logical coherence as a regional reference, and its stubborn insistence upon authoritative documentation through evidence, analysis, and description. DARE4 records countless illustrations of those distinctive features that mark excellence in lexicography. Here are a few examples.

AS A HISTORICAL DICTIONARY. Like the Oxford English Dictionary (OED 1933), DARE reflects the resources of historical linguistics. In the acquisition of evidence through fieldwork, DARE applies the methods of linguistic geography, an old and familiar field of historical linguistics.

And linguistic geography not only demonstrates the fact that language covers space and social structure, it also points toward sources. For example, someone somewhere first called that wild American hog a pineywoods rooter, and, based on the evidence gathered in DARE, chances are better than good that the word maker in fact came from the Piney Woods, from North Carolina to Mississippi.

From a historical perspective, the regional domains of words and phrases offer insights that relate to the development of the language, especially the process of semantic acquisition. The DARE4entry pachuco is defined nicely as "a young Mexican-American, esp a gang member, often identifiable by distinctive clothing, hairstyle, and dialect; the dialect of such a person." Although none of the entries provides descriptive evidence of the pachuco zoot suit or the ducktail hairdo, the references to dress, grooming, and dialect indicate a California cultural phenomenon. At the same time, this entry demonstrates the range of DARE research. Neither drapes 'pants wide atthe kneeswith a very high rise' nor pegged pants appears as a DARE entry, nor should it. Like the ducktail hair style (more commonly ducks-ass), these identify short-lived fads after World War II, some of which endure in early photographs of Elvis Presley. All three became generalized before they could be regionally particularized, reinforced by pre-bebop musicians such as Lester Young and other members of Count Basie's Kansas City Band, and in comic strips, Dick Tracy's nemesis Flat-top comes immediately to mind. Of these four,only pachuco, the genuine California regionalism, appears as a DARE entry.

The lexical process includes historical analysis and arrangement of senses and citations, what OED editors call "the historical treatment of every word." From a diachronic perspective, such interpretation yields not only a series of synchronic observations, as in successive frames of cinematography or time-lapse photography, but also rich materials that take a student quite close to first semiotic causes from an American point of view. For example, Webster's Third International Dictionary of the English Language (MW3 1961) includes the entry piggin string [origin unknown] with the descriptor: "West: a small rope used by cowhands for tying cattle by the feet." Although not as egregious as MW3's spelling pulley bone, the entry suggests...