Linkfest for March 2018: Emoji press, art, and best language podcasts

I was quoted in TIME talking about Dictionary.com’s decision to add entries for emoji and on CBC The Current talking about emoji in the courtroom.

This month’s Lingthusiasm episode was about Translating the Untranslatable (transcript) and the bonus episode was about the Grammar of Swearing (a tweet about our topic inspiration). We added a Teaching page with episodes listed by topic to the…

People periodically ask me about ways to get started writing about linguistics for a general audience. Here’s one option that’s come to my attention, from Dictionary.com: 

We are looking for writers with expertise in lexicography, linguistics, or a language-related field to contribute articles to our site, Dictionary.com.

Got a lot to say about words? Able to write objectively and descriptively about words that might have political or cultural overtones, or be found as offensive by some? Good at tackling hard concepts and boiling them down to fresh and approachable prose? We’d love to hear from you. You will be paid $40 for each article accepted by our editors for publishing.

I’ve been told that the articles are 350-500 words and that they’re looking for multiple contributors, ideally from a range of different backgrounds to work on words from different domains. So if you’d like to have influence on how your slang gets portrayed in a dictionary, or want to get a start in linguistics writing or lexicography, this may be interesting for you.

For more details and how to apply, see the full posting. 

What I did in March 2017: #SXSW Words panel, #ICLDC5 #lingwiki, @Lingthusiasm on Patreon

Many talks and travel in March! I began the month in Hawai’i, where I ran several lingwiki editathons at the International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (#icldc5) and also got to attend the Hilo Field Study and learn about Hawaiian language revitalization.

I then headed directly to South by Southwest, where I moderated a panel called Word Curation: Dictionaries, Tech and…

Jane Solomon is a lexicographer at Dictionary.com. She has a BA in English literature with a minor in linguistics from Northwestern University. In December 2016, she talked to Elena about being a lexicographer as part of the linguistics jobs series.

Hi Jane! I’ve been a fan of your work for some time and it’s a real honour to chat with you. Can you tell us a bit about what you do for a living?

I’m a full-time lexicographer at Dictionary.com, but that’s not all I do there. My official title is Senior Content Editor and Lexicographer: I write and update definitions, I write for the blog, I edit Word of the Day, which I used to author every three months. I do some PR work when Dictionary.com releases new words: I review the press releases, make sure that they’re linguistically sound, and fill in some details about the actual work lexicographers do; then I talk to the press about it. I also lead the Word of the Year project. It’s a big team effort, but I come up with the timeline, write the first draft of the blog post, and do the publicity for that.

I’m the only full-time lexicographer in the office, so I often give talks about the history of lexicography for new employees, to give them some background about why we’re doing what we’re doing. Dictionary.com is a dictionary company but also a tech company, so most of the people in the office are tech people and don’t necessarily have any background in language at all. So my job is also to communicate the importance and history of what we’re doing, and get everyone excited about that.

I’m definitely excited about lexicography! How would you describe a regular day?

On a day-to-day basis, I’m probably thinking about what words we want to add to the dictionary and what the public would be most interested in seeing. Sometimes I’ll be working on existing words to update them. Right now, I’m working on a batch related to the words mom and dad, which have been going through some changes in the recent past in terms of their slang usage.

When you go in to modify or add a definition to an already established word, it’s important to make sure you read closely everything that is already there. It might be that there are some definitions that were in regular use when they were first written, but they are now archaic, or maybe offensive. Reassessing a word’s usage is an important part of modifying definitions. A dictionary may seem like a static document, but language is constantly changing and the dictionary should reflect that.

How many words do you add to the dictionary, say, per year?

It depends on the year and on the resources we have that year. Usually, in terms of new words, it’s about 400 to 600 new words and definitions per year. In terms of entries that we edit, we touch thousands a year for various reasons.

I would have never guessed it was so many! Would you say there’s a difference between adding words to an online dictionary compared to a printed dictionary?

With an online dictionary, you have the luxury of space. This is not the case for a printed dictionary, where you have a fixed amount of pages. A printed dictionary sometimes has to remove words that fall out of use because there simply isn’t enough space to keep them all, and the editors have to make a choice about what words are more valuable to the users than others. With an online dictionary, you don’t have that concern. If a word is added, we’re not going to take it out, especially if people want to look it up.

What is the research process behind adding new words and writing definitions?

The research process is intensive and very rigorous. Any time we want to add a new word or definition, we need to understand how it’s actually being used in the language: do our intuitions reflect how a word is actually being used and not just how we personally speak? Of course, we need to reflect a wider reality and supply evidence for anything that we write. This involves corpus research. Usually, at first I’ll have a one-sentence definition and a page of notes about the research I’ve done. I’ll write down where I first saw the word being used in a certain sense, for example. Sometimes, if I’m dealing with a slang word that’s new and a little harder to pin down, I’ll make my own subject-specific corpus and try to understand the word from there. At the same time, we have an etymologist helping with the history of the word as well.

Another thing about lexicographers is that they think in sets: if you want to add a word related to gender identity, for example, you need to look up other words related to gender identity. Corpus research is really helpful in that, because you can look up other words that are used in the same context or appear in the same web page, like gender fluid and cisgender might.

We also consider whether people want to look up a certain word or not. Dictionary.com is able to keep track of what words are being searched, and some of these searches do not correspond to a dictionary entry. Sometimes they’re misspellings, sometimes they’re rare variants of a word. Sometimes they’re completely valid words that we haven’t covered yet. That’s where we also get ideas on which words to add to the dictionary.

Writing individual entries takes a lot of research. Lexicographers approach every word with the same respect and care to detail, whether it’s a slang word or a tech word, which is an interesting thing because not all users share this point of view. Sometimes people get upset about certain words being in the dictionary and they complain, but as lexicographers we have no desire to censor our dictionary. We just want to reflect how English is used, now and in the past.

You don’t really see job postings for lexicographers, at least in this day and age. What was your path from getting your degree to where you are now?

I have a BA in English literature with a minor in linguistics, but linguistics was never really just a minor. I worked in a child language acquisition lab throughout college, at Northwestern University. I was really excited about the field and got involved with the department: for two summers I got summer research grants to pursue my own linguistic research, and one of the papers I wrote won a prize. I just didn’t happen to double major, which was a stressful decision at the time. My academic advisor reassured me that even if I didn’t double major, there was evidence of my interest in the field thanks to what I had pursued. I was also thinking of going into film at the time: I had some internships with WTTW in Chicago, which is a PBS affiliate, and worked on a film set. I had a lot of interests and I was pursuing different things; I didn’t want to go in one direction or another at that point.

Then, during the last semester of my senior year, the university offered a guest course about lexicography taught by Erin McKean [founder of Wordnik.com]. I did all the homework for the class despite the fact that I was only auditing it. I was very excited about it and loved it! Right after I graduated, the University of Chicago hosted a Dictionary Society of North America meeting. Erin invited her students to volunteer at the meeting, which I did. The banquet in particular was amazing: I was sitting with lexicographers, dictionary enthusiasts and collectors, and at one point, a group of them went up to the front and started singing Gilbert and Sullivan songs with the lyrics changed to be about lexicography. That’s the kind of thing you can expect at a dictionary conference!

My first job in lexicography came a few months after graduation. It was a freelance gig I had heard about through Erin, working on the Oxford Sentence Dictionary project. The job involved assessing the different meanings of various words in example sentences they had selected. That opportunity led to being recommended to a few more freelance jobs, which I pursued on top of my full-time job in educational publishing. It was intense, but it was rewarding and the work was always interesting.

I continued to go to the Dictionary Society of North America meetings, which are held every two years. So when the second time came around, I had some experience working in the field. I told people I was looking for work, and the fact that I was in my mid-20s definitely drew attention because there aren’t that many people under 30 at these conferences. After I was laid off from my job in educational publishing–the industry was suffering at the time–I relied on freelance lexicography jobs as my sole source of income. It felt great and exciting because I was doing something so interesting within a small community.

I didn’t even apply to my current job at Dictionary.com. I was recommended for it by colleagues I had met at conferences and who had seen my work. So whatever area of linguistics you want to pursue, find the people in that field and go talk to them! Networking and talking to people face to face is one of the things that helped me the most in getting started.

When I was a student, I remember telling people that I wanted to compile dictionaries for a living and they would stare at me in disbelief because they thought dictionaries were a thing of the past. Do you think lexicography is a viable career nowadays?

A lot of the people who think that lexicography is not an actual career don’t realize that dictionaries are written by human beings. They might not think dictionaries are written by machines either, but rather they think of them as relics of the past. Whether or not lexicography is a viable career gets into another question, which is what dictionaries will look like in the future. In the past, people would be given dictionaries are presents when going to college, and they would keep referencing it later in life despite the fact that the dictionary would be outdated. People used to be loyal to certain dictionaries.

In the era of electronic dictionaries, we have the benefit of having constantly updated dictionaries, but at the same time people have become more “source agnostic.” In this technological landscape, people want definitions to come to them and not the other way around, so sometimes they forget that definitions are coming from a dictionary in the first place. When you search a word on Google and you see a definition, you’re basically asking Google a question and finding an answer, instead of going directly to a dictionary. People nowadays have a different relationship with dictionaries and dictionary brands, and how to search for words.

This situation also gets to the viability of this career path. I have to say that when I started, I thought I would have never had a full-time job in lexicography, and I assumed I would just do it on a contract basis. I think that this is a safe assumption to make if you want to go into this field. The fact that I do this as a full time job is a complete surprise to me! I feel very, very lucky that I get to do this kind of work. There are very few jobs in this industry, and there are fewer and fewer each year. There isn’t the same infrastructure to train new lexicographers that used to exist even 15 years before I entered the field. New lexicographers used to be trained on site, while all my training was done remotely.

Looking at dictionaries ten years from now, I would say that people will be even more source agnostic. I don’t know how much virtual assistance will take off, but think about the relationship you might have with Siri, Alexa, and the like. With these technologies, you ask one question and you get one response. That’s a very different relationship from opening up a dictionary, looking up a word, and finding words that might be related to it. It’s very different from online dictionaries too, where you search for a word and you get several definitions. The idea of dictionaries having to cater to this new way of information retrieval will be a crucial one in lexicography: if you could only show one definition, what would you show? Would it depend on the context? Would it depend on what the user has asked in the past?

If you want to pursue a career in lexicography, it’s really important to be computationally minded. You’re going to do corpus research. Even better yet, you could help build tools that would adapt to a changing technological landscape of how people access definitions. It’s a field that’s rapidly changing, and no one is sure what it will look like in ten years. You need to be interested enough in the topic that no matter where it leads you, you will enjoy the process of learning everything related to it. Go into this field with reservations, with knowledge that you’ll have to adapt to wherever it goes.

What concrete steps can someone take to prepare for a career in lexicography?

Going to conferences and networking has been very helpful. It definitely helps when the people who have the power to give you work actually meet you face to face and see that you are an intelligent person and not just a name on a resume. If there’s someone whose work you really admire, go see them talk! Engage them in conversation about their work.

Are there any links or other resources that you’d recommend?

Read articles in linguistics so that you can have an informed opinion. All Things Linguistic is a good source for information about internet slang. Ben Zimmer  always has interesting things to say in his Wall Street Journal column. The Word of the Year vote at the American Dialect Society, which happens every January, is open to the public.

In my experience, a love for words and etymologies is what sparks interest in linguistics for many people. In your opinion, what would people be surprised to know about lexicography?

Something that might surprise people, but not linguists, is that many etymologies that people talk about are not true. For example, people with no linguistics background sometimes hear two words in English that sounds alike, and assume that they are etymologically related. But that’s just not how English works! In fact, there are homographs that have completely different etymologies and derive from different languages entirely.

I read this question on Reddit last night and who better than you to answer this. What are some fun words, like bamboozle, that we can sprinkle into conversation for fun?

I actually think I have a perfect word for this. This is a delightful word: grimalkin. It means “elderly female cat.” It can also be used with the meaning of “ill-tempered old woman” but I don’t like this definition much. It’s fun to say grimalkin, and it has such a specific definition, which is what I really like about it.

A lot of trends in language are, like, constantly criticized by older generations. What do you find truly exciting about the way we speak today?

I’m really excited about emoji right now! Every time new emoji come out, I love seeing how usage changes. Emoji are obviously not a language and more of a paralinguistic phenomenon.

In terms of words, however, it’s been such a dark year. My mind is very much on “Word of the Year” right now, because Dictionary.com just released their word of the year, and so did other dictionaries. I am on the American Dialect Society’s committee for their word of the year as well [Update: which ended up being dumpster fire]. I would say, even if there have been these really negative words becoming Word of the Year, I’m trying to peer through the darkness and see what are the silly and ridiculous words in 2016, words that are just more lighthearted as a relief.

On a lighter note, every year there seems to be a new type of selfie that people are talking about. One word that I learned this year is fingermouthing, which is putting your finger around your mouth in a selfie. Another interesting word that was talked about a lot in 2016 was hamdog, which is a portmanteau of hamburger and hot dog. I delight in learning words like that, because even when the world is hit by depressing events, I can still take small joys in language creativity. I mean, the Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year was post-truth, and Dictionary.com’s was xenophobia, but 2016 also brought us fingermouthing and hamdog, you know?

My monthly newsletter for January 2017: LSA panel, talk, #lingwiki and livetweets

I gave a talk about Stumbling into linguistics via blogs and Wikipedia at a panel on Getting High School Students into Linguistics which I co-organized with Moti Lieberman at the Linguistic Society of America annual meeting in Austin, Texas. My slides are at bit.ly/lingwiki-lsa2017 and our whole panel’s slides and abstracts are available here.

I also gave a talk about how people lengthen words on…