<i>Dictionary of American Regional English</i> (review)
1991; Volume: 13; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/dic.1991.0008
ISSN2160-5076
Autores Tópico(s)Lexicography and Language Studies
ResumoREVIEWS Dictionary ofAmerican Regional English. Vol. II. D - H. Frederic G. Cassidy, Chief Editor. Joan Houston Hall, Associate Editor. Cambridge , MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, xv + 1,175 pp. $59.95 U.S. Sometimes it has seemed as if the reviewers ofthe Dictionary ofAmerican Regional English are engaged in a contest as to who can give it the most laudatory praise. That is not an unreasonable thing to do, because our laudatory remarks are, I believe, true. It would be difficult to achieve hyperbole. For over a century, American scholars, centered in the American Dialect Society, have had high hopes of producing a dialect dictionary, but these hopes were dashed decade after decade. At last in DARE we have a genuine fruition. The quest to make a replete record of the American vocabulary has been a long struggle. You will note that I have said "replete" and not "complete ." The DARE that we have before us is nothing if not "replete," as even a glance at it shows; but the absolutistic word complete will always remain problematical. The struggle to make this record had its tentative beginnings in the 18th century, and the names of Jonathan Boucher and John Witherspoon loom largest there. The chronicle of collectors in the 19th century—John Pickering, John Russell Bartlett, and many others—makes an interesting story by itself, and good studies of them have appeared and will continue to appear. In 1889, when the American Dialect Society was founded, and in succeeding decades, the great model wasJoseph Wright's project in England. Its collecting period from the 1870s and 1880s until the publication of the English Dialect Dictionary (1898 to 1905), resulted in its six thick volumes and a pretentious sub-title: The English Dialect Dictionary: Being the Complete Vocabulary ofall Dialect Words Still in Use, or Known to Have Been in Use During the Last Two Hundred Years, Founded on the Publications of the English Dialect Society and on a Large Amount ofMaterial Never Before Printed. You will note the problem- 116Reviews atical words complete and all. DARE has no sub-title at all, and thus is in much better taste on that score. The plans of the ADS began to be articulated in the 1890s. But mishaps have occurred, decade after decade, and I might mention some of them, as they form a background for the work we have under review. Rich collections were printed in Dialect Notes in the 1890s. They were drained off, however, by Sylva Clapin in his New Dictionary of Americanisms (New York: L. Weiss, 1902). Many members felt that he did not give sufficient credit to the Society's collections and that he had "stolen" them. The Society had ups and downs, depending on the dynamism of the secretary of the time. I joined the ADS in 1927 (with the sad passing of Hans Kurath, I may now be the member with the longest span of membership) and found at that time that there was much discussion about producing a dictionary. It was led particularly by Percy Waldron Long, who had strong dictionary interests from his G. & C. Merriam connections. I had extensive discussions with him in the Modern Language Association offices. Our concern came to the fore again in connection with the Dictionary ofAmerican English on Historical Principles edited by Sir William Craigie at the University of Chicago (1938-; Chicago: UC Press), which I was working on from 1932 to 1938. Was there room for both ours and a "Dialect Dictionary?" We regularly set aside slips for it because we left out terms that were definitely local. The trouble was that almost all such slips would have other words that would be useful to us in other parts of the alphabet. I did do quite a bit ofsetting aside, but George Watson (the Associate Editor, a Scot with a singletrack mind) would come along and recycle them into our own file. Our localism file never grew very big, and I am doubtful that any material was saved in the long run. Then another hazard presented itself when the Society fell into the hands of Miles Hanley. He was an inspirational scholar (many students...
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