This is the illusionist in which I, Helen Zaltzman, try to find the puncture repair kit because language sprang a leak.
Today's episode is another one with someone I met at this year's Dictionary Society of North America conference, or Dick Kon, as a friend, insisted on calling it.
This episode concentrates on some english language dictionary history, but I am very keen to know about lexicography in other languages and other cultures.
If you have any appetites, tell me about it.
On with the show.
It is kind of wild to think that we could take one component of the language, that is words and their meanings.
Which language is more than that?
Language is both the lexicon and the grammar, how we string those words together, and then also how we convey those words vocally, written in signs, so on and so forth.
So it's wild that we would take just the words and talk about what they mean in a way that was universal and shared, because that's not actually how the language works.
And, in fact, this was a very odd idea when people first started doing it.
John Florio made a dictionary of English and Italian where he said, I know y'all are gonna, like, think I'm nuts for trying to do this, but I'm gonna tell you just the words.
Even though words are women and sentences and full grammar is a man.
Yes, those are the genders.
Yeah.
So the idea that we could just have a dictionary that's only words is already a little bit wild in terms of how language works.
I'm coming off as a total dictionary hater, but, no, I don't think so.
I mean, you wouldn't have dedicated your life to these topics if you disliked them.
Yeah.
There's nothing to make you hate a dictionary like studying it, though.
I think that's with everything, isn't it?