Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

Passing English of the Victorian era, a dictionary of heterodox English, slang and phrase (1909) by J. Reeding Ware.

Quoted from the Preface:

HERE is a numerically weak collection of instances of ‘Passing English’. It may be hoped that there are errors on every page, and also that no entry is ‘quite too dull’. Thousands of words and phrases in existence in 1870 have drifted away, or changed their forms, or been absorbed, while as many have been added or are being added. ‘Passing English’ ripples from countless sources, forming a river of new language which has its tide and its ebb, while its current brings down new ideas and carries away those that have dribbled out of fashion. Not only is ‘Passing English’ general ; it is local ; often very seasonably local. Careless etymologists might hold that there are only four divisions of fugitive language in London west, east, north and south. But the variations are countless. Holborn knows little of Petty Italia behind Hatton Garden, and both these ignore Clerkenwell, which is equally foreign to Islington proper; in the South, Lambeth generally ignores the New Cut, and both look upon Southwark as linguistically out of bounds; while in Central London, Clare Market (disappearing with the nineteenth century) had, if it no longer has, a distinct fashion in words from its great and partially surviving rival through the centuries the world of Seven Dials, which is in St Giles’s St James’s being ractically in the next parish. In the East the confusion of languages is a world of ‘ variants ‘ there must be half-a-dozen of Anglo-Yiddish alone all, however, outgrown from the Hebrew stem. ‘Passing English’ belongs to all the classes, from the peerage class who have always adopted an imperfection in speech or frequency of phrase associated with the court, to the court of the lowest costermonger, who gives the fashion to his immediate entourage.
…

A healthy reminder that language is no more fixed and unchanging than the people who use it.

Enjoy!

Green’s Dictionary of Slang

From the about page:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang is the largest historical dictionary of English slang. Written by Jonathon Green over 17 years from 1993, it reached the printed page in 2010 in a three-volume set containing nearly 100,000 entries supported by over 400,000 citations from c. ad 1000 to the present day. The main focus of the dictionary is the coverage of over 500 years of slang from c. 1500 onwards.

The printed version of the dictionary received the Dartmouth Medal for outstanding works of reference from the American Library Association in 2012; fellow recipients include the Dictionary of American Regional English, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. It has been hailed by the American New York Times as ‘the pièce de résistance of English slang studies’ and by the British Sunday Times as ‘a stupendous achievement, in range, meticulous scholarship, and not least entertainment value’.

On this website the dictionary is now available in updated online form for the first time, complete with advanced search tools enabling search by definition and history, and an expanded bibliography of slang sources from the early modern period to the present day. Since the print edition, nearly 60,000 quotations have been added, supporting 5,000 new senses in 2,500 new entries and sub-entries, of which around half are new slang terms from the last five years.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang has an interesting commercial model.

You can search for any word, freely, but “more search features” requires a subscription:

By subscribing to Green’s Dictionary of Slang Online, you gain access to advanced search tools (including the ability to search for words by meaning, history, and usage), full historical citations in each entry, and a bibliography of over 9,000 slang sources.

Current rate for individuals is £ 49 (or about $59.96).

In addition to being a fascinating collection of information, is the free/commercial split here of interest?

An alternative to:

The Teaser Model

Contrast the Oxford Music Online:

Grove Music Online is the eighth edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and contains articles commissioned specifically for the site as well as articles from New Grove 2001, Grove Opera, and Grove Jazz. The recently published second editions of The Grove Dictionary of American Music and The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments are still being put online, and new articles are added to GMO with each site update.

Oh, Oxford Music Online isn’t all pay-per-view.

It offers the following thirteen (13) articles for free viewing:

Sotiria Bellou, Greek singer of rebetiko song, famous for the special quality and register of her voice

Cell [Mobile] Phone Orchestra, ensemble of performers using programmable mobile (cellular) phones

Crete, largest and most populous of the Greek islands

Lyuba Encheva, Bulgarian pianist and teacher

Gaaw, generic term for drums, and specifically the frame drum, of the Tlingit and Haida peoples of Alaska

Johanna Kinkel, German composer, writer, pianist, music teacher, and conductor

Lady’s Glove Controller, modified glove that can control sound, mechanical devices, and lights

Outsider music, a loosely related set of recordings that do not fit well within any pre-existing generic framework

Peter (Joshua) Sculthorpe, Australian composer, seen by the Australian musical public as the most nationally representative.

Slovenia, country in southern Central Europe

Sound art, a term ecompassing a variety of art forms that utlize sound, or comment on auditory cultures

Alice (Bigelow) Tully, American singer and music philanthropist

Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, soliders’ relationship with music is largely shaped by contemporary audio technology

Hmmm, 160,000 slang terms for free from Green’s Dictionary of Slang versus 13 free articles from Oxford Music Online.

Show of hands for the teaser model of Oxford Music Online?

The Consumer As Product

You are aware that casual web browsing and alleged “free” sites are not just supported by ads, but by the information they collect on you?

Consider this rather boastful touting of information collection capabilities:

…
To collect online data, we use our native tracking tags as experience has shown that other methods require a great deal of time, effort and cost on both ends and almost never yield satisfactory coverage or results since they depend on data provided by third parties or compiled by humans (!!), without being able to verify the quality of the information. We have a simple universal server-side tag that works with most tag managers. Collecting offline marketing data is a bit trickier. For TV and radio, we will with your offline advertising agency to collect post-log reports on a weekly basis, transmitted to a secure FTP. Typical parameters include flight and cost, date/time stamp, network, program, creative length, time of spot, GRP, etc.

Convertro is also able to collect other type of offline data, such as in-store sales, phone orders or catalog feeds. Our most popular proprietary solution involves placing a view pixel within a confirmation email. This makes it possible for our customers to tie these users to prior online activity without sharing private user information with us. For some customers, we are able to match almost 100% of offline sales. Other customers that have different conversion data can feed them into our system and match it to online activity by partnering with LiveRamp. These matches usually have a success rate between 30%-50%. Phone orders are tracked by utilizing a smart combination of our in-house approach, the inputting of special codes, or by third party vendors such as Mongoose and ResponseTap.v
…

You don’t have to be on the web, you can be tracked “in-store,” on the phone, etc.

Converto doesn’t mention explicitly “supercookies,” for which Verizon just paid a $1.35 Million fine. From the post:

…
“Supercookies,” known officially as unique identifier headers [UIDH], are short-term serial numbers used by corporations to track customer data for advertising purposes. According to Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, a technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, these cookies can be read by any web server one visits used to build individual profiles of internet habits. These cookies are hard to detect, and even harder to get rid of.
…

If any of that sounds objectionable to you, remember that to be valuable, user habits must be tracked.

That is if you find the idea of being a product acceptable.

The Green’s Dictionary of Slang offers an economic model that enables free access to casual users, kids writing book reports, journalists, etc., while at the same time creating a value-add that power users will pay for.

Other examples of value-add models with free access to the core information?

What would that look like for the Podesta emails?

American Regional English dictionary going online by Scott Bauer.

From the post:

University of Wisconsin students and researchers set out in “word wagons” nearly 50 years ago to record the ways Americans spoke in various parts of the country.

Now, they’re doing it again, only virtually.

This time they won’t be lugging reel-to-reel tape recorders or sleeping in vans specially equipped with beds, stoves and sinks. Instead, work to update the Dictionary of American Regional English is being done in front of computers, reading online survey results.

“Of course, language changes and a lot of people have the notion that American English is becoming homogenized,” said Joan Houston Hall, who has worked on the dictionary since 1975 and served as its editor since 2000.

The only way to determine if that is true, though, is to do more research, she said.

The dictionary, known as DARE, has more than 60,000 entries exposing variances in the words, phrases, pronunciations, and pieces of grammar and syntax used throughout the country. Linguists consider it a national treasure, and it has been used by everyone from a criminal investigator in the 1990s tracking down the Unabomber to Hollywood dialect coaches trying to be as authentic as possible.
…

A great resource if you are creating topic maps for American literature during the time period in question.

Be aware that field work stopped in 1970 and any supplements will be by online survey:

Even though no new research has been done for the dictionary since 1970, Hall said she hopes it can now be updated more frequently now that it is going online. The key will be gathering new data tracking how language has changed, or stayed the same, since the first round of field work ended 43 years ago.

But why not break out the 21st century version of the “word wagon” and head out in the field again?

“Because it would be way too expensive and time-consuming,” Hall said, laughing.

So, instead, Hall is loading up the virtual “word wagon” also known as the online survey.

For language usage, there is a forty-three (43) year gap in coverage. Use caution as the vocabulary you are researching moves away from 1970.

The continuation of the project by online surveys will only capture evidence from people who complete online surveys.

Keep that limitation in mind when using DARE after it resumes “online” field work.

Personally, I would prefer more complete field work over the noxious surveillance adventures by non-democratic elements of the U.S. government.

BTW, DARE Digital, from Harvard Press is reported to set you back $150/year.