Conference thebay::joyoflex

185.0. "OED supplement ready" by TLE::SAVAGE (Neil, @Spit Brook) Fri May 09 1986 12:54

Associated Press Thu 08-MAY-1986 17:33                             Dictionary

                     Oxford English Dictionary Completed
    
                             By GRAHAM HEATHCOTE
                           Associated Press Writer
    
    LONDON (AP) - Robert Burchfield, who put patootie, see-through dress
    and yuppie into the Oxford English Dictionary, saw his great work
    finished Thursday. 
    
    The Oxford University Press published the fourth and last of
    Burchfield's supplements adding modern words to the lexicon. The Times
    of London promptly hailed the volume, "Se-Z," as "the last word for the
    present on the Queen's English." 
    
    The 12-volume Oxford dictionary has been the arbiter on the English
    language since the first volume appeared in 1884 and the last in 1928.
    When Burchfield began the task, in 1957, of adding all the words that
    have appeared since 1928, his publishers expected it to be a
    one-volume, seven-year effort. But it has run to four volumes, 6,000
    pages, over 50,000 new words with hundreds of thousands of usages, and
    500,000 citations showing where they were first used. 
    
    "I feel as if I'm putting down a great burden, but also that I'm giving
    up a companion of the last 29 years," Burchfield, a 63-year-old New
    Zealander, said in a telephone interview from Oxford. 
    
    Patootie means girl-friend, see-through dress hardly needs defining,
    and a yuppie is a rich young, upwardly mobile professional who's making
    it in a business center like New York or London. The terms are all
    American. 
    
    "American influence on English is very strong - in fact, the British
    people have simply got to brace themselves to the center of gravity of
    the English language having moved from Britain to the United States,"
    Burchfield said. 
    
    "That's hardly strange, because there are five times as many American
    speakers of English as British, and at least five times as much
    investment in science and technology over there, so they produce at
    least five times as many new words as we do," Burchfield said. 
    
    He added that, "a whole lot of words are coming through from the
    computer revolution, which first happened in America, like `wraparound'
    and `two-address system,' and more from sport, satellites, rockets and
    medical research. 
    
    Burchfield said the liveliness of English surprised him. "I'd been a
    teacher of English in Oxford before I took on the dictionary and I
    thought that English went quiet after 1500 with the start of printing,"
    he said. "Then I found that at least 500 to 1,000 words come into
    permanent residence every year, and there may be many more depending on
    whether you count complicated technical words." 
    
    "I'm no censor, by the way. I put everything in, even the rude ones." 
    
    "Break dancing" isn't in the first of Burchfield's supplements, volume
    "A-G" which came out in 1972, nor is "Live Aid." They're too modern.
    But they will go into the Oxford family of dictionaries, which sell at
    the rate of 6.2 every minute throughout the world, the publishers
    claim. 
    
    And everything in the old dictionary and the new ones is being punched
    into a computer, which the publishers say callers will be able to dial
    up in four or five years. 
    
    The 12-volume Oxford dictionay and its one-volume 1933 supplement has
    remained in print and now costs $963. The first two of Burchfield's
    supplements cost $131 each and the last two $139 each.