Words in Dictionaries and History: Essays in Honour of R.W. McConchie (review)

This festschrift is written in honor of Rob McConchie, a scholar whose varied interests include the English language, literature, and culture and who has contributed much to our understanding of medical terminology, the structure and production of dictionaries, lexicographers, and grammar. The collection of articles included reflects the scope and depth of McConchie’s contributions and interests. The book is divided into two parts. The first is dedicated to the history of dictionaries, their production and their importance to society beginning in Tudor England and continuing to modern online publications. The second is a series of lexicographic and etymologic studies, also arranged chronologically. Each article includes an abstract, keywords, and a bibliography.

The first three articles deal with lesser known works and authors. In the first article Ian Lancashire explores the little known lexicographical work The Flores Ouide which was used in sixteenth century England by students as a source to help them translate or better yet understand Ovid’s works. The article communicates clearly the use and role of The Flores in the early Tudor education system and its relation to other bi-lingual grammar school texts and dictionaries. Jukka Tyrkkö follows up Lancashire’s work with a discussion of the life and work of a surgeon named John Halle and particularly his contribution to the glossary included in Lanfranc’s A most excellent and learned vvoorke of chirurgerie. As in the first article, John Halle’s work was also dedicated to translation and education. In the third article, John Considine explores the possible identity of the author of a planned dictionary, the circumstances of his life, and finally, why the dictionary was never produced.

Gabriele Stein moves away from the lesser known works to the more familiar work of Thomas Eliot, the first work called ‘Dictionary’ in the English Language. In this article, Stein explores the relationship between headword and gloss and the how the structure of individual entries in dictionaries has changed, especially if their intended audience was foreign or bilingual or if the end use of the dictionary was primordially educational. Giles Goodland explores the omissions of Dr. Johnson’s well-known Dictionary. He compares Johnson’s poetic work and his “active vocabulary” to the Dictionary. By doing so Goodland teases out Johnson’s attitude toward “the language of poetry” and his reasons for not including the very words he is purportedly cataloguing. Elizabeth Knowles traces the case of caos and old night from Milton’s Paradise lost, its uses, its origins, and how it appears in dictionaries of quotations. In Online dictionaries of English Slang Julie Coleman closes the first section of the book by bringing the dictionary discussion out of the past and into the present and examines the contributions of online dictionaries to our knowledge of contemporary slang and how their management affects “coverage and reliability” of these sources.

The second part of the book, dedicated to lexicographical topics, opens with four articles dealing with etymology. Matti Kilpiö draws scholarly attention to Christfrid Ganander’s Nytt Finskt Lexicon and analyzes the Finish words associated with English etymologies within it. Anatoly Liberman reexamines the etymology of the terminology yeoman, its coining and phonetics. Based on letters housed among the records of the British East India Company, Samuli Kaislaniemi sheds light on colloquial language use appearing in these letters. In this article, he analyzes the term lapidable meaning “mature for sexual intercourse” and discusses the language use by merchants associated with the East India Company. Cynthia Lloyd analyzes the first appearances of the suffix in English –al and the deverbal derivatives of this suffix. Through the analysis of the replacement of Roman toponymyc names with Anglo-Saxon ones in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, Alaric Hall lays bare the shift from a Roman to early Anglo-Saxon England. Leena Kahlas-Tarkka continues to explore the shift from Roman to Anglo-Saxon England and the rise...