Last night (November 4, 2009), I went down to the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater on West 26th Street in Manhattan to be a guest on Seven Second Delay, a radio show broadcast on WFMU and streamed from the show’s blog. (No, no apostrophe in Citizens is needed; it’s a brigade made up of citizens, not a brigade for citizens–that is, it would be, if it existed. But the show’s name ought to have a hyphen in it: Seven-Second Delay.)
It’s not a language show; it’s an unscripted weekly talk show very much in the style of late-night comedy programs on television, only a lot less slick. Once a month, the program is broadcast from the UCB Theater instead of from the studio. It has two hosts: Andy Breckman, a former writer for David Letterman and Saturday Night Live who is the creator and executive producer of the TV series Monk (or was; he kept talking last night about having just joined the ranks of the unemployed); and Ken Freedman, station manager and program director of WFMU.
One of my fellow guests was the Saw Lady, Natalia Paruz, who told me before the show that people in the saw-playing community were divided about calling themselves “sawists” (like pianist, violinist) or “sawyers” (people who play the saw). I pointed out that sawyer already existed as a word for someone who puts a saw to its more typical use. And that people who play, say, the bass are called either bassists or bass players, not “bassers.”
She liked my rationale, especially since she was in the “sawist” camp herself. Then she said, “So how do I get ’sawist’ into the dictionary?”
In all the media appearances I’ve made promoting and discussing dictionaries, that question is always in the top three (along with “What new words are going in the dictionary?” and “What’s your favorite word?”). I used to try to explain that there’s no single “the” dictionary, for a start, and that different dictionary houses have different criteria for how long a word needs to be watched before it is included. I also would point out that the word has to appear in a variety of printed, edited sources, not in a hundred faxes all sent in to the dictionary publisher by the word promoter’s relatives.
But now, I have an easier task, thanks to the increasing openness of dictionary site developers to interactivity. I told the Saw Lady to type “sawist” into the field at Wordnik.com. When you type in a word, whether it exists in the site’s data set or not, you can click on a link to leave a comment on the word. I suppose it’s the 2009 equivalent of sending in a fax, but it might get more noticed.
If you do find a legitimate use of an emergent meaning or word, Grant Barrett would like to hear from you. He’s the proprietor of the Double-Tongued Dictionary, whose mission (according to the Web site) is to record “undocumented or under-documented words from the fringes of English, with a focus on slang, jargon, and new words.” (Instructions about what is and is not a legitimate citation are available on the site.)
Oh, and my favorite word is serendipity.
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