Thank you! I really enjoyed your live podcast session too (when I heard the topic, have to admit that I immediately thought of Túrin, because, well, so much chaos and calamity, but you did a great job of making the case for a much less well known character!) And the slides/memes were on point 😁
(Yes, as a Canadian it is always particularly good fun when I get to help add Canadian English words to the Oxford English Dictionary!)
Need to swing by the dep to pick up some milk? Have memories of acquiring many, many duotangs for the start of school?
Duotang, pharmacare, Chiac, dep, and advance poll are among this quarter's additions to the OED - among others: www.oed.com/discover/new...
#canada #canadianenglish #lexicography
If you are anywhere near London and would like to be distracted from the state of the world for a few blissful hours, may I thoroughly recommend the current production of Much Ado about Nothing at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane? Shakespearean comedy at its finest: I have not laughed so hard in months.
And how to find the time to try all of them (in the name of scientific research, naturally - surely writing these definitions would be easier if I had tasted more of the things I am writing about)?
Problems in historical lexicography: how many recipe clippings is too many when you are working on a word related to French patisserie?
Title page of _A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles_, a.k.a. the Oxford English Dictionary, published on 1 February 1884.
Happy 141st anniversary of the publication of the first fascicle (A–ANT) of _A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles_, later to be known at the Oxford English #Dictionary (OED).
GM is already in! And DM is definitely on a watchlist. I am now curious about "conductor", which I haven't run across in a TTRPG-specific context before. How would you use it / what sort of meaning does it have in a gaming context?
(And then of course we have many external experts whom we consult as well, if it's something from a language where we don't have extensive expertise in-house!)
As for the etymology, we have a team of about a dozen etymologists (all with different backgrounds and specialties) who research each one.
Not quite a committee - more of a massive database of suggestions that we track; when we find that there's enough evidence from a wide variety of sources over a substantial period of time, a suggestion is assigned to an editor (me or one of my colleagues!) to research: www.oed.com/information/...
This is a bit belated, but the good folks at the OED asked me to write about some of the new words we added this past quarter (so of course I had to write about TTRPG terms, baking, mystery novels, and systems for organizing books): www.oed.com/discover/the...
"Like all empires, this one rested on a foundation of lies." #Oathbreakers, out from @harpercollins.bsky.social on 12/10. The story of how Charlemagne's grandsons fought a brutal civil war and shattered the Frankish Empire.
SIGNED COPY GIVEAWAY. Repost to enter. First drawing 7 pm CST USA. /1
I feel like I know some people who might have strong opinions on this one: Oxford University Press is once again asking for public input to help choose the Oxford 2024 Word of the Year. Romantasy? Demure? Dynamic pricing? Brain rot? Slop? Or lore? You can vote here: corp.oup.com/word-of-the-...
That the 1856 quotation refers to the phrase as a "maxim" does make me wonder if there might be earlier evidence out there, that I simply haven't turned up yet...
(The obligatory caveats to all of this are a) the phrase/advice may well have been in use in spoken language before it was written down, and b) this sort of research is very dependent on the texts accessible in the databases/library resources one has access to.)
"Now there's the secret for you, children. Always write about what you know, and it will not be such hard work, after all."
"One day somebody asked one of these same little boys why it was that he liked to write compositions so well... After a minute, he said: 'I guess it's 'cause I always write about what I know.' (continued)
(reprinted several places, including the Lafayette Daily Courier, Feb. 18, 1865, but also the Ohio Educational Monthly for April 1865 - the following is the text as printed in the Lafayette Daily Courier):
But there are also plenty of repetitions of this advice from the same (or slightly earlier) period that make no reference to Emerson. As, for instance, this 1865 article by Date Thorne entitled "Something about Composition":
"Indeed, if Emerson's advice had been followed generally in this volume, 'Write what you know', even the commissioner's work would probably have occupied much less than 105 pages."
However, by 1873, the phrase was already somewhat associated with him, at least enough for a reviewer in the journal Old & New (Volume VIII, August 1873) to write:
... *but* I cannot find that Ralph Waldo Emerson actually used the exact phrase himself in print (though he may, of course, have expressed something similar in conversation!)
In at least one later edition of Emerson's diaries (Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson with Annotations, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes, Volume VIII, published 1912), this latter (1855) passage is described in the Table of Contents as "Write what you know"...
In a 1855 entry Emerson makes a similar comment: "I hold that a wise man will write nothing but that which is known only to himself."
"Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know." (But this was not *published* in 1849, so we cannot assume that an unnamed 1856 columnist would have been aware of Emerson's opinions...)
In addition to Twain, it is sometimes attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and it's admittedly true that about the same time (May 1849), he had some similar thoughts, and wrote in his diary:
"To write what you know is the true maxim for success with all; do not get out of your depth, and then never will critics be drowned in melancholy while authors are flounding in the gulf of obscurity."
"The truth is, every writer, whether man or woman, is but a poacher on the fields of literature who comes forth without nature's license in the pocket... (continued)
By Dec. 14, 1856, the Sunday Delta (New Orleans) has this to say (which is the earliest I've been able to find, so far, of the exact phrase in what seems to be very close to the modern use):