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Whys and Hows of Collecting for the Dictionary of Canadian English II. Excerption of Quotations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

Charles J. Lovell
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Extract

Having decided to lend a hand with the Dictionary of Canadian English, one’s first thought will be to read various items of Canadiana for the purpose of excerpting quotations. In his initial burst of enthusiasm, the volunteer is likely to tackle something on the order of the Publications of the Hudson’s Bay Record Society, Cartwright’s Labrador Journal (1792), Pennant’s Arctic Zoology, Isham’s Observations on Hudson’s Bay (1743), Palliser’s Journals (1863), or files of such pioneer newspapers as the Loyalist (York), Qu’Appelle Vidette, or Bob Edwards’s Calgary Eye Opener. While works like these are ideal sources of citations for the dictionary we envisage their every importance renders them unwise choices for the neophyte. It is not enough to select works of historical value, for mere mechanical examination of the most promising sources cannot be expected to yield optimum results in the absence of a thorough knowledge of the field of inquiry. Not only is there the risk that the unskilled researcher will fail to notice some unfamillar words, illustrative of the life and thoughts of earlier periods, but he may also miss a few common ones. Then, too, he may waste time in collecting irrelevant material. Since the earlier examples of more settled words are ordinarily hardest to locate and, of course more prized, the consequences of an inexperienced researcher overlooking, say, an 1856 example of Confederation (for it was used anticipatively well before 1867) are rather more serious than would be the skipping of more recent words. The products of a disciplined understanding are superior to those of an uncultivated understanding, so it is to our helpers’ advantage to learn as much as possible of the basic principles of lexical research before delving into scarcer source materials.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 2 , Issue R1 , March 1956 , pp. 23 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1956

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References

Notes

1 For instance, the Dictionary of American English does not trace Santa Claus beyond 1823 one of its readers having missed 1807 evidence in Washington Irving’s Salmagundi. Even more serious lapses occur in the Oxford English Dictionary, where a single quotation of American blight an insect pest is dated 1882, although its bibliography lists works of 1829, 1840, 1945 and 1847, all of which employ the term conspicuously.

2 A university student, excerpting an article on California history for the DAE, frittered away time upon such utterly useless terms as archives, barracks, belfry, breviary, brutish, deemed, feudal, heathen, infirmary, jurist, nomadic, paganism, pantaloons, patriarchal, privateer, protectorate, restive, rosary, tallow and trinket, while being blind to such obvious Americanisms as adobe, atole, carajo, coyote, Golden Gate, gringo, Mission Indian, New Englander. Pacific Coast, pinole, pueblo, quarter section, rancher, tortilia, tule basket and Yankee.

3 There are few Canadian texts the wordage of which will run to as much as three per cent of terms quotable within the limits here suggested. Vivid hockey writeups and and stories of pioneer days commonly approach this maximum, whereas articles of a technical or scholarly nature rarely contain more than a fraction of one per cent of Canadianisms using the latter terms in its broadest sense.

4 Sir William Craigie, editor of the DAE, thmfuly took down hundreds of citations on the backs of old envelopes.

5 Whereas the OED and DAE were prepared mainly from longhand slips, compositors nowadays expect copy to be typed. For instance the DAE’s entries of bog potato and “hog” potato stemmed from different interpretations of a single citation, the cacography of the excerptor being at fault.

6 Toronto papers might consider a society cocktail party to be “big” news, while lacking space to report a ladies’ aid meeting, box social, quilting bee or hayride: items of Interest to the rural press—and our dictionary. Regular dictionaries, in utilizing but the most accessible sources, sometimes miss a number of rather common words. Thus, terms like Queen’s Scout and to fly up, of known importance in the Boy Scout and Girl Guide movements, are absent from the authoritative Oxford Universat Dictionary (third edition, revised, 1955). While more than 3,400,00 boys are enrolled in the Boy Scouts of America, none of their ranks, from tenderfoot to Eagle Scout, are included among the 132,000 entries in the American College Dictionary.

7 For Instance, the DAE and DA use the same quotation to exemplify namaycush, salmon trout and tutadi.

8 The usual meaning of outage is either a power failure” or a “scheduled interruption in the transmission of electrical energy.

9 Here is an excellent example of a word requiring an accumulation of instances for its proper definition Berrey and Van den Bark’s American Thesaurus of Slang defines Herring Choker, as “a Scandinavian while Swan’s Anglo-American Dictionary characterizes it as an Americanism for “Scandinavian or Prince Edward Islander.”