I wonder how many linguists he had to canvass to find one who was willing to go on record discouraging people from using unusual words?

I don't think he knows what a linguist is. What he found was a professor of education, and although some professors of education are also (applied) linguists, Clive Beck isn't, so far as I can tell.

I add the necessary disclaimer that Brown may have distorted, or even invented, the quote.

I've heard Barber on the radio a few times, and in person once. From what I know of her sense of humour, I can easily imagine her saying something like "We lexicographers just feel there are too damn many words in the language" in jest (the more words there are, the more work she has to do), and relying on her audience to be, unlike Brown, clever enough to realize she wasn't serious.

I don't think he knows what a linguist is. What he found was a professor of education

Excellent point; I should have read even more skeptically, obviously.

I can easily imagine her saying something like "We lexicographers just feel there are too damn many words in the language" in jest..., and relying on her audience to be, unlike Brown, clever enough to realize she wasn't serious.

Also an excellent point.

I doubt very much that it's Black's "lingualism" that's keeping him from the stand. I suspect it's that he comes across as the most arrogant, entitled snob you could possibly imagine. Any jury would loathe him the minute he opens his mouth.

I don't know why journalists insist on seeing themselves as champions of the language and linguists as their enemies. I'm beginning to feel that the biggest threat to the language isn't linguists, as journalists love to claim, but the journalists themselves.

I thought tricoteuses usually referred to the ladies knitting at the foot of the guillotine, rather than just "knitters of yarn" as he says.

Still, as an ex-hack myself, it's not a bad insult.

Likewise, isn't the International Journal of Lexicography for lexicographers? Sure, there's lots of corpus linguistics and so on. (I used to get it -- for fun, I am neither. But it was damned expensive.) And who precisely are these alliterative learned language leaders?

As someone who not only knows what a yataghan is, but has a collection of them, I'm wondering how it got to be ye sworde of ye heathen Mahommedans. Turkish guardless sword. Or Ottoman, if you want to make it clear that taxi drivers in Ankara don't wear them. Are rapiers slender sharp hilted swords used in Christian countries? I gotta say that this kind of "innocent" orientalism seems a lot more dangerous than too many words.

Ian Brown has become fascinated with all of this because of the Conrad Black trial in Chicago. Black is very famous in Canada for his vocabulary, and Brown has written about this two or three times over the course of the trial. It almost smacks of an obsession.

D

gasconading (blustering)
Hey, I know that one!

And who precisely are these alliterative learned language leaders?
Um, Mr. Brown apparently has very little idea as to what lexicography is. Or, for that matter, what a scholarly journal is.

Does anyone else find the phrase "a splashy lemma" a bit out of place, too?

I'm all for a big vocabulary and pulling out the obscure and archaic words on occasion, but I don't think one should just throw them out there willy-nilly for the hell of it. One, it makes you look like a pedantic snob. Two, the purpose of speech is communication; clear communication isn't very easy when another person needs the OED to figure out what the hell you're saying. Three, words like "poltroon" and "gasconading" are best thought of as spices that make a conversation yummy in small amounts, but make you sweat and have diarrhea if over-used.

Splashy lemma: out of place. Agreed.

"I don't know why journalists insist on seeing themselves as champions of the language and linguists as their enemies."

I think journalists, or at least some journalists, see themselves as language experts because they write constantly. But of course journalism is only one small aspect of the language. It would be a bit like a civil engineer--even a good one--issuing pronouncements on particle physics.

The idea that the language needs defending is an old one. Traditionally, journalists were regarded as one of the groups the language needed defending against, but it is an easy transition for a journalist to cast himself in the defender role.

Why are linguists the enemy? Because they often reach the wrong conclusion, defining "wrong" as "different from what I already know". The idea that language is a real field of study, using real data and stuff, is alien. After all, the journalist became an expert without all that pointy-headed stuff. So if we take as given that the language needs defending, and that linguists often say wrong stuff about the language, it follows that linguists are at best suspect.

I have never seen "lemma" except in maths, where it's handy rather than "splashy".

Well, "lemma" = "headword in a dictionary". Only it's one of those terms that are specific to a particular field of science (lexicography) and, more importantly, it's not the same as "word". Just another thing Mr. Brown isn't aware of.

No, "yataghan" is not in the Princeton Review's "Hit Parade" of the 50 most frequent vocabulary words appearing on the SAT. It's not even in the top 250. However, "florid" does make the cut.

One of the things I've explained to kids when tutoring them for the SATs is that the so-called "Hit Parade" is made up of words that frequently appear in type of national-caliber periodicals that people read on subways, at Starbucks, or in the throne room -- places where dictionaries (for the most part) are not handy. In short, they're words educated readers are expected to know off the tops of their heads.

We're never going to level the playing field if admittedly delightful, yet essentially obscure, words like "yataghan" get tossed into the short list of what we're expecting 16-year-olds to master.

Meanwhile, Brown completely botches his reporting on the composition of the new SAT. The Math segment now only counts for 800 out of 2400 total points, rather than 800 out of 1600 points. Could someone please explain to me how that constitutes giving greater emphasis to mathematics?

The segment that most colleges are currently choosing to overlook is the Writing segment, which introduced the much-ballyhooed essay requirement. Instead, colleges are focusing on the Critical Reading segment, which contains the most direct remaining test of vocabulary: multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank sentences. That's where kids hit a dead end if they don't know "candor" from "quandary" from a hole in the ground, and no amount of digging with a yataghan is going to bail them out.

Well, duh.