Editorial

This issue of Dictionaries opens with the third installment of Michael Adams’s history of the Dictionary Society of North America, the journal’s publisher. Relying on abundant archival material, the story Adams tells constitutes “a chapter in the history of the language sciences,” he says, and the first three installments of the story do that and more. They tell the story of a group who, from the start, aimed to create a community of men and women interested in sharing their interest in and knowledge of dictionaries and in creating forums for propagating that knowledge. Part I dealt principally with DSNA’s founding circumstances and Part II with its founding leaders. Part III focuses on DSNA membership patterns and on members themselves during the early years, 1977 to 1989. As an example, Adams describes correspondence between Ed Gates, DSNA’s founder, and New York Times columnist William Safire. Safire had provided readers of his “On Language” column a broad description of DSNA, with its benefits and low membership fee, and the society’s rolls exploded, testing its office capacity and prompting consternation among support staff charged with meeting the expectations of the new “Safire members.” Other unexpected and sometimes delightful reports appear in this installment, and one’s appetite for the final installment is whetted.

Elizabeth Knowles relies on archival and other material to focus her examination of the wartime backdrop to the initial publication of The Oxford Book of Quotations. The first edition of ODQ appeared in the fall of 1941 in British and American versions, identical but for their introductions, the American Carl van Doren writing one for North American readers, the Englishman Bernard Darwin another for British readers. The contents of ODQ were compiled before the outbreak of World War II, and Knowles addresses the challenge Oxford University Press faced in offering a book of quotations devoid of obvious reference to wartime in Britain and impending war in the US. She describes the “ingenious” way in which Darwin played on tropes familiar to those following Churchill and Roosevelt and their citation of poems to give the volume a sense of timeliness. As a chapter on the history of publishing and on the complex interplay between a reference book, its times, and the imagined expectations of its audiences, “One Dictionary, Two Introductions” touches not only on the exigencies of wartime publishing such as paper rationing but also on the balancing act required of publishers seeking contributions from distinguished, if overly busy, contributors.

Stephen Turton likewise addresses the relevance of cultural and social circumstances to reference works, in particular to hard-word and general dictionaries of the early modern period. “Unlawful Entries” is a richly ambiguous title for Turton’s discussion of dictionary treatments of buggery and sodomy in the 150 years preceding publication of Dr. Johnson’s dictionary in 1755. Despite the incoherence that Turton finds in definitions of those two and related words in early modern English dictionaries, he concludes that “the silences and paradoxes embedded in these early definitions allow them to be read from perspectives that are more radical than their writers likely intended.”

One perspective through which Turton’s discussion of entries on buggery and sodomy might be viewed relates to the difference between words and things. It is just that difference between a dictionary entry and an encyclopedia article that Michael Hancher explores in “Dictionary vs. Encyclopedia.” Hancher begins his analysis before the OED and focuses on Trench, Murray, and Gove among subsequent lexicographers, while also discussing philosophers of language, including Paul Grice. Balancing a dictionary entry’s defining a word and its describing the thing the word names has been a perennial challenge for lexicographers and, despite commitments particularly to definitions of the word as opposed to description of the thing, honoring the commitment has proven challenging, if not impossible, in practice. Observers have long noted the challenge, and Hancher cites Allen Walker Read’s observation that “it is difficult to construct a dictionary without considerable attention to the objects and abstractions designated.”

Quite different in focus from the other four articles in this issue, Caroline Myrick argues for “The Value of Local Dictionaries in...