MP3 • APPLE PODCASTS • RSS • GOOGLE • TRANSCRIPT
There's an abiding myth that the landmark dictionaries are the work of one man, in a dusty paper-filled garrett tirelessly working away singlehandedly. But really it took a village: behind every Big Daddy of Lexicography was usually a team of women, keeping the garrett clean, organising the piles of papers, reading through all the citations, doing research, writing definitions, editing, subediting...essentially being lexicographers, without the credit or the pay.
Academic Lindsay Rose Russell, author of Women and Dictionary-Making, talks about the roles of women in lexicography: enabling male lexicographers to get the job done, but also making their own dictionaries, and challenging the very paradigms of dictionaries.
EXTRA MATERIALS:
Read Mary Evelyn’s Fop Dictionary - maybe don’t rush to make the face water recipe.
Jonathon Green’s Dictionary of Slang is all available to view for free online.
“How is a woman made to disappear?” Searching for Eileen O’Shaughnessy, the wife written out of George Orwell’s autobiographical nonfiction and biographies.
Dictionary.com just added ‘mountweazel’ and a bunch of other terms that I am either a) surprised weren’t already in there or b) too old to know about.
Otherlusionists relevant to this episode: as well as the last episode on Project ENABLE, there’s Mountweazel; The Authority, where Kory Stamper talks about being a lexicographer for Merriam-Webster; Word of the Day is about how Dictionary.com’s word of the day is chosen.
Support the show at theallusionist.org/donate and as well as keeping this independent podcast going, you also get behind-the-scenes glimpses about every episode, the Allusioverse Discord community, and fortnightly livestreams featuring relaxing readings from my dictionaries, here they are:
That red one perched on top is where I got
YOUR RANDOMLY SELECTED WORD FROM THE DICTIONARY:
geniculate, geniculated, adjective: bent like a knee; jointed; knotted; verb transitive: geniculate, to form joints in; noun: geniculation. Latin: geniculatus, geniculum, a little knee - genu, the knee.
CREDITS:
Lindsay Rose Russell is an academic at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is also the author of Women and Dictionary-Making: Gender, Genre, and English Language Lexicography.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, with editorial help from Martin Austwick, who also provides the Allusionist music. Download his songs at palebirdmusic.com and listen to his podcasts Song By Song and Neutrino Watch.
Find the Allusionist at youtube.com/allusionistshow, twitter.com/allusionistshow, facebook.com/allusionistshow, @allusionistshow.bsky.social and instagram.com/allusionistshow
