D3X73R

The scene behind the KFC near my Barbadian hotel is rather unlike the scene behind the KFC near my Brighton home As I mentioned in the last post , and as I have been wont to mention at any opportunity, I got to go to Barbados recently. It was my first time in the West Indies and it was fabulous—even if I did spend much of it in a windowless conference room. In the weeks before I went there, I was wont to mention at any opportunity that I was going to Barbados soon. And this is when my (obviously jealous) English friends started pointing out (or was it mocking?) that I didn't say Barbados like they say Barbados . I (in my American way) say the last syllable as if it is the word dose . Theirs sounds like (BrE) doss   or the acronym for 'disk operating system': DOS . In saying it they use the 'rounded short o' vowel that Americans like me don't have . I was gratified to learn, in the welcoming speeches at the conference, that Barbadians pronounce the last vowel ...

I'm just back from a FABULOUS time at the Dictionary Society of North America conference. Fabulous not just because it was hosted by the University of the West Indies in Barbados (wheeeeee!), but because dictionary people are just the best people. No offen{c/s}e academic linguists, cognitive scientists, parents of 9-year-olds, Scrabblers, Murphys, and other folk I'm apt to hang out with, but lexicographers (orig. AmE) have the edge. I have (for a couple of years, part-time) been an actual English-dictionary lexicographer, for the Encarta World English Dictionary . (Among my job titles were "Americanizer", "Compiler", and "Specialist Lexicographer: Languages and linguistics".) I loved it. (I also loved that the publisher, Bloomsbury, sent me some random book with each payche{ck/que}. I got my best soup [orig. AmE] cookbook that way.) But the job I REALLY wanted, the one that would have kept me out of academia, was a job with Merriam-Webster of Spri...