Search Term: oed is 80

Reflections on Ebbets Field

By Daniel Campo
At the turn of the 20^th century, the baseball team in Brooklyn was known as the Superbas and they played ball at Washington Park, between First and Third streets along Third Avenue near the Gowanus Canal. While the park was convenient for its patrons, located in a densely developed part of the borough and connected to trolley lines on 3^rd and 5^th avenues, fans and players frequently complained about the awful odors emanating from the canal and nearby industrial works.

Woman – or Suffragette?

By Lynda Mugglestone
In 1903, the motto “Deeds not Words” was adopted by Emmeline Pankhurst as the slogan of the new Women’s Social and Political Union. This aimed above all to secure women the vote, but it marked a deliberate departure in the methods to be used. Over fifty years of peaceful campaigning had brought no change to women’s rights in this respect; drastic action was, Emmeline decided, now called for.

Friday procrastination: hatchet-man edition

By Alice Northover

If my grandfather could survive the Siege of Leningrad and still distinguish between a German and a Nazi, then so can I says Polina Aronson. Shakespeare and food. The Sight and Sound Film Poll: An International Tribute to Roger Ebert and His Favorite Films

Friday procrastination: cool videos edition

By Alice Northover

Google Plus and academic productivity. Extremely rare triple quasar found. Fitting in with our March Madness: Atlas Edition, Oxford Bibliographies in Geography launched this week. Nonsense botany from Edward Lear. His nonsense language wasn’t bad either. Dead authors can tweet you out of the water. A reminder about Open Culture’s master list.

No great shakes? You are mistaken

By Anatoly Liberman
I am saying goodbye to the Harlem Shake. The miniseries began two weeks ago withdance, moved on to twerk and twerp, and now the turn of the verb shake has come round. Reference books say little about the origin of shake. They usually list a few cognates and produce the Germanic etymon skakan (both a’s were short)

Twerk, twerp, and other tw-words

By Anatoly Liberman
I decided to throw a look at a few tw-words while writing my previous post on the origin of dance. In descriptions of grinding and the Harlem Shake, twerk occurs with great regularity. The verb means “to move one’s buttocks in a suggestive way.” It has not yet made its way into OED and perhaps never will (let us hope so), but its origin hardly poses a problem: twerk must be a blend of twist (or twitch) and work (or jerk).

Social media and the culture of connectivity

By José van Dijck
In 2006, there appeared to be a remarkable consensus among Internet gurus, activists, bloggers, and academics about the promise of Web 2.0 that users would attain more power than they ever had in the era of mass media. Rapidly growing platforms like Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), and Twitter (2006) facilitated users’ desire to make connections and exchange self-generated content.

Out of Shakespeare: ‘Aroint thee’

By Anatoly Liberman
Dozens of words have not been forgotten only because Shakespeare used them. Scotch (as in scotch the snake), bare bodkin, and dozens of others would have taken their quietus and slept peacefully in the majestic graveyard of the Oxford English Dictionary but for their appearance in Shakespeare’s plays. Aroint would certainly have been unknown but for its appearance in Macbeth and King Lear.

The dog: How did it become man’s best friend?

The 11th February marks the opening of Westminster Kennel Club’s 137th Annual All Breed Dog Show. First held in 1877, the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show is America’s second-longest continuously held sporting event, behind only the Kentucky Derby. The Westminster Dog Show epitomizes our long-standing tradition of domestication of dogs, but how did we arrive at such a moment in human and dog relations? The Encyclopedia of Mammals, edited by David MacDonald, offers some explanation as to how this species went from being wild prey-hunters to “best in show”, and from defending territories to defending last year’s titles.

‘Dr. Murray, Oxford’: a remarkable Editor

Dictionaries never simply spring into being, but represent the work and research of many. Only a select few of the people who have helped create the Oxford English Dictionary, however, can lay claim to the coveted title ‘Editor’. In the first of an occasional series for the OxfordWords blog on the Editors of the OED, Peter Gilliver introduces the most celebrated, Sir James A. H. Murray.

National Libraries Day UK

Ever wondered what the Latin word for owl is? Or what links Fred Perry and Ping Pong? Maybe not, but you may be able to find the answers to these questions and many more at your fingertips in your local library. As areas for ideas, inspiration, imagination, and information Public Libraries are stocked full of not only books but online resources to help one and all find what they need.

‘Ebonics’ in flux

By Tim Allen
On this day forty years ago, the African American psychologist Robert Williams coined the term “Ebonics” during an education conference held at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri. At the time, his audience was receptive to, even enthusiastic about, the word. But invoke the word “Ebonics” today and you’ll have no trouble raising the hackles of educators, journalists, linguists, and anyone else who might have an opinion about how people speak.

A Grove Music Mountweazel

By Anna-Lise Santella
On my desk sits an enormous, overstuffed black binder labeled in large block letters “BIBLE”. This is the Grove Music style sheet that was handed to me on my first day on the job, the same one — with a few more recent amendments — assembled by Stanley Sadie and his editorial staff for the first edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians published in 1980.

Wrenching an etymology out of a monkey

By Anatoly Liberman
Primates have given Germanic language historians great trouble. In the most recent dictionary of German etymology (Kluge-Seebold), the entry Affe “ape” is one of the most detailed. In the revised version of the OED, monkey is also discussed at a length, otherwise rare in this online edition. Despite the multitude of hypotheses, the sought-for solution is not in view.

Chaucer in the House of Fame

By Jonathan Dent
By the time Geoffrey Chaucer died in 1400, he had been living for almost a year in obscurity in a house in the precincts of Westminster Abbey, and on his death he was buried in a modest grave in the church’s south transept. The poet’s last few months had not been his happiest. At the close of a decade in which he had gradually retired from the various administrative offices he had occupied under Edward III and Richard II, Richard’s deposition by Henry Bolingbroke in September 1399 had turned Chaucer’s world upside down.

Memories of undergraduate mathematics

By Lara Alcock
Two contrasting experiences stick in mind from my first year at university. First, I spent a lot of time in lectures that I did not understand. I don’t mean lectures in which I got the general gist but didn’t quite follow the technical details. I mean lectures in which I understood not one thing from the beginning to the end. I still went to all the lectures and wrote everything down – I was a dutiful sort of student – but this was hardly the ideal learning experience…