In attempting to pursue more
research into exploring the linguistic understandings of Scrabble and its official dictionary, I only came across rare
allusions to the board game and the occasional reference to Margaret Atwood’s use
of the game in her The Handmaid’s Tale. Even within this current academic dearth,
however, Scrabble remains a key point
in my new topical direction towards understanding electronic lexicography as a
response to the arguable limitations the point system, square gridding and
obscure arbitrary linguistic choices Scrabble
competition, both at the domestic and international level, can lead people
into. The consideration of how the most
recent generation of lexicographers have all been transferring and building
online dictionaries, lexicons and linguistic resources shows how language
choice is expanding and responding to any limitation that could be placed on
understanding English or any human language.
| Courtesy of global.oxforduniversitypress.com |
Considering
my paper’s research and topics don’t include a focus on the shifting of the Oxford English Dictionary from an exclusively
print medium towards an online version, it is therefore worth analyzing this central
topic within the current generations growing push towards accessible online
lexicography. The scholarship of Charlotte Brewer in her academic work “Only Words” speaks to the shift of the OED from a century of two editions
exclusively in print to the possibility of a purely pixelated version. She discusses the ability to “skip blithely
from one end of the alphabet to the other in the blink of an eye”; however, she
also accounts for the anxiety and “hand-wringing about the loss of this unwieldy
behemoth” (Brewer 17). She locates the
difficulty of it ever having become physically tangible as one reason as to why
an online conversion of this once Victorian age project of the 19th
century resulted in disturbances throughout the English speaking worlds. Brewer also recognizes various forms of
critique and response from users of how “even OED Online enthusiasts
concede that any things immediately evident in the printed book are obscured or
not apparent: the length of an entry…its relationship to its neighbors” (18). Ken Winter also offers a scholarly voice in
this shift through his article “From Wood Pulp to the Web: The Online Evolution”. He locates the initial updating issues for print
versions of the OED in 1884, 1928 and
1989 which is no longer an issue with the online version’s ability for quarterly
additions. From an academic perspective
as well, Winter asserts through the OED’s
chief editor that this resource is “more of a ‘database for humanities research’
than a dictionary” in the words of Warburton (Winter 71). Brewer’s scholarship acquiesces that the
online transference of this central dictionary aids in rapid maintenance and addition
of new terminology.
John Ezard of the Guardian provides a less
academic voice in the societal and intellectual implications of this
lexicographical shifting the OED to
the internet. The context of this embracing
the digitization of the nearly one hundred and fifty year old OED in the year 2000 saw the largest
reference book addition to the online community. Ezard stated that the OED Online presents
something “less venerable, monstrously larger, and far quicker at reflecting
shifts in the language”. He goes on to
specify that every three months one thousand words will be added to the online version,
representing the constant flux of language in the original dictionary authority
which for most of its existence it was not held accountable for even as a
constant reality of linguistic change.
This merging of the past world of compiling, codifying and producing
various volumes of seminal dictionary with the abstract albeit more expansive
and growing electronic lexicography shows that language analysis and understanding
is moving farther and quickly beyond the exclusive stagnation of print as well
as numerical point values on wooden tiles in family’s game room cupboards.
