American Dialect Society

The Barnhart Dictionary Companion [quarterly]

The Barnhart New-Words Concordance

“Prizes and Pitfalls of Computerized Searching For New Words For Dictionaries,” in Dictionaries [publication of the Dictionary Society of North America], No. 7, 1985

“Reflections In Lexicography” in American Speech, Vol. 75.4, Winter 2000

“Words of the Century” in the Poughkeepsie Journal, May 9, 1999

Contact David K. Barnhart:
http://lexikhouse.com
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P.O. Box 2018
Hyde Park, N.Y. 12538
(914) 850-8484

Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Areas of expertise: Literacy, writing, bilingualism, the state of the English language, language reform, language and the law, technology and communication.

Dennis has made frequent radio appearances to discuss language issues, and has written op-ed essays on language and literacy issues in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He received a doctorate in English from the University of Michigan in 1971, a Masters from Columbia University in 1969 and a BA from Brandeis University in 1965.

Publications:

The English-Only Question: An Official Language for Americans? (Yale Univ. Press, 1990)

Guide to Home Language Repair (NCTE, 1994)

Declining Grammar (NCTE 1989)

Grammar and Gender (Yale Univ Press, 1986)

Grammar and Good Taste: Reforming the American Language (Yale Univ. Press, 1982)

“Don’t make English Official; Ban It Instead”

“Ebonics and the Politics of Language”

Contact Dennis Baron:
http://www.uiuc.edu/goto/weboflanguage
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Mobile telephone: (217) 840-0776

Grant Barrett
Areas of Expertise:
Slang, jargon, new words (neologisms), new language, buzzwords, lexicography, dictionaries, thesauruses, word histories, American slang, political slang, online slang, teen slang, youth language.

Editor of the “Among the New Words” column of the academic journal American Speech, head of the “New Words Committee” and Vice President of Communications and Technology of the American Dialect Society; co-host of the nationwide public radio show about language, A Way With Words; editor of the Double-Tongued Dictionary, a web site that collects new words, slang, and jargon; Editorial director of Wordnik, an online dictionary that aims to collect every word in English; editor of The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English (McGraw-Hill, May 2006) and The Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang (July 2004); formerly, Editor, U.S. Dictionaries, Oxford University Press; formerly Project Editor, Historical Dictionary of American Slang. Grant occasionally writes for newspapers such as the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Malaysia Star. He has edited dictionaries for Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and the Collins-brand bilingual dictionaries.

Grant received a BA in French from Columbia University and has a professional background in broadcast and print journalism.

Contact Grant Barrett:
Main phone (646) 286-2260 (mobile/home/office);
San Francisco (415) 894-WORD/(415) 894-9673 (forwards to main phone);
U.K. 020 8133 1997 (forwards to main phone)
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Web site: Double-Tongued Dictionary

Ronald R. Butters
Professor of English and Cultural Anthropology, Duke University

Areas of Expertise:
Language and law; meaning and change of meaning in American English words, particularly terms of abuse and taboo words; American social and regional dialects; American English in general.

Ron received a BA and PhD from the University of Iowa in English, the PhD with a concentration in linguistics. He has taught at Duke University in North Carolina since 1967.

Publications:

The Death of Black English: Divergence and Convergence in White and Black Vernaculars. Bamberger Beiträge zur Englischen Sprachwissenschaft, 25. Frankfurt am Main / Bern / New York: Peter Lang, 1989.

“Linguistic Change in Words One Owns: How Trademarks Become ‘Generic’,” Studies in the History of the English Language II. Ed. By Anne Curzan and Kim Emmons. Topics in English Linguistics. (Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, forthcoming in 2004) [Jennifer Westerhaus, second author] [Revision of a paper read at the Second Conference on the History of the English Language, University of Washington, Seattle, 23 March 2002.]

“Literary Qualities in Sociolinguistic Narratives of Personal Experience,” American Speech 76 (Fall 2001), 227–35. [American Dialect Society Presidential Address, January 2001.

“‘We didn’t realize that lite beer was supposed to suck!’:The Putative Vulgarity of X sucks in American English,” Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America 22 (2001). [Revision of a paper read at the meeting of the American Dialect Society, January 6, 2000.]

Contact Ron Butters:
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Web site: Trademark Linguistics

Gerald Cohen
Professor of German and Russian, University of Missouri-Rolla.

Areas of Expertise:
Etymology, especially of British and American slang, and the origin of terms such as “hot dog,” “shyster,” “eureka,” and “The Big Apple,” “gung ho,” “shyster,” “jazz,” “namby pamby.”

Gerald is the editor of Comments on Etymology, a series of working papers which began in 1971. He has a Ph.D. in Slavic Linguistics from Columbia University, and primarily researches etymologies.

Publications:

Studies in Slang (7 volumes; last one co-authored)

Origin of New York City’s Nickname “The Big Apple”

Dictionary of 1913 Baseball and Other Slang (3 vols.)

Contact Gerald Cohen:
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Office: (573) 341-4869

Connie Eble
Professor of English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Editor of the journal American Speech

Areas of Expertise:
American college slang; language in Louisiana.

Connie is an expert in university and college slang. She received her doctorate in linguistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she has been a faculty member in the Department of English since 1971.

Publications:

Slang and Sociability, 1996, UNC Press

“The Englishes of Southern Louisiana” In Stephen J. Nagle and Sara L. Sanders, Englishes in the Southern United States, 2003, Cambridge U Press.

Contact Connie Eble:
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Office: (919) 962-0469, Mon., Wed., Fri., 11 a.m.-noon EST

Wayne Glowka
Dean of Arts and Humanities, Reinhardt College, Waleska, Georgia; former editor of “Among the New Words” for the journal American Speech, former chair of the American Dialect Society Committee on New Words

B. A. in English, May 1973, University of Texas at Austin
M. A. in English, May 1975, University of Texas at Austin
Ph. D. in English, May 1980, University of Delaware

Areas of Expertise:
New words (neologisms), history of the English language

Publications:

A Guide to Chaucer’s Meter. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1991.

Language Variation in North American English: Research and Teaching. Ed. with Donald M. Lance. New York: MLA, 1993.

Wace Le Roman de Brut: The French Book of Brutus. Translator. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005.

Articles in Teaching Writing, Gypsy Scholar, Explicator, Victorian Poetry, Allegorica, USF Language Quarterly, Interpretations: A Journal of Idea, Analysis, and Criticism, Poetica: An International Journal of Linguistic-Literary Studies, American Speech, Arthurian Interpretations, Studies in American Humor, Text and Tradition in Layamon’s Brut, International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, Literacy and Orality in Early Middle English Literature, Dictionaries, La3amon: Contexts, Language, and Interpretation.

Contact Wayne Glowka:
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Office (770) 720-5628

Jill Hallett
Areas of Expertise:
African-American English, Indian English, classroom-based discourse, American/ world Englishes, linguistics and literature, secondary education.

Affiliation:
PhD Candidate, Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Assistant Editor of World Englishes

Major Publications:

2009. Packaging social worlds: Micro- and macro-social replication in mass-mediated discourse. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences: Illinois Working Papers 2009: 58-80. Available online at http://hdl.handle.net/2142/13860.

2009. New voices in the canon: The case for including world Englishes in literature. In Lucia Siebers & Thomas Hoffman (eds.) World Englishes: Problems, properties, prospects. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

(forthcoming) Codeswitching in Diasporic Indian and Jewish English-Language Media. In Facchinetti, Roberta, David Crystal and Barbara Seidlhofer (eds.), Global English. Theoretical Aspects and Cross-Linguistic/Cultural Case Studies. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Also, several book reviews and notices in eLanguage, Linguist List, and Journal of PragmaticsJournal of Pragmatics

Contact Jill Hallett:
phone: (until June 2010): +91-96-5427-5127
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http://illinois.academia.edu/JillHallett

Kirk Hazen
Areas of Expertise:
Language and society; ethnic dialects; Appalachian English; Southern English; language and education; language change,

Affiliation:
West Virginia Dialect Project, Department of English, West Virginia University

Major Publications:

Identity and ethnicity in the rural south: A sociolinguistic view through past and present be. 2000. Publications of the American Dialect Society No. 83. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

A dialect turned inside out: Migration and the Appalachian Diaspora. 2008. Coauthored with Sarah Hamilton. Journal of English Linguistics 36.2:105-128.

The study of variation in historical perspective. 2007. Sociolinguistic variation: Theory, methods, and applications. Robert Bayley and Ceil Lucas, eds. Cambridge University Press. 70-89.

Variationist approaches to language & education. 2007. An entry for The Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Ed. Volume 10: Research Methods in Language and Education. Nancy Hornberger and Kendall King (eds.). Springer. 85-98.

Language knowledge for the medical community. 2006. A chapter for Ham, R., Gainor, S.J., Jones, R., Durbin, M., Lambert, J., (Eds.), Rural Culture: West Virginia’s Legacy, Morgantown, WV, Mountain State Geriatric Education Center. 49-57.

Contact Kirk Hazen:
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phone: (304) 293-9721
http://www.as.wvu.edu/~khazen/

William A. Kretzschmar, Jr.
Areas of Expertise:
English language studies, especially survey research on language variation and corpus linguistics. American English and dialects. Sociolinguistics. Humanities computing. English lexicography. Complexity science.

William A. Kretzschmar, Jr., is Harry and Jane Willson Professor in Humanities at the University of Georgia, where he teaches English and linguistics. He serves as board member for various professional journals, atlases, and dictionaries, including preparation of American pronunciations for the new online Oxford English Dictionary. He is the Editor of the American Linguistic Atlas Project, the oldest and largest national research project to study how people speak differently in different parts of the country, and maintains an active community-language field site in Roswell, Georgia. He has performed consulting work over the years for forensic, industrial, and academic clients (see www.text-tech.com), with a particular specialty in large-scale automated document evaluation. His Linguistics of Speech demonstrates that language in use, speech, is a complex system as described for the physical and natural sciences, and thus suggests how complexity science can help to solve practical and commercial language problems.

Major Publications:

The Linguistics of Speech (Cambridge U Press, 2009)

Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English (with Clive Upton and Rafal Konopka; Oxford U Press, 2001)

Introduction to Quantitative Analysis of Linguistic Survey Data (with Edgar Schneider, Sage Publications, 1996)

Handbook of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (with Virginia McDavid, Theodore Lerud, and Ellen Johnson; U Chicago Press, 1994).

Contact Bill Kretzschmar:
American Linguistic Atlas Project
Text Tech
phone: 706-542-2246
email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

James A. Landau
Areas of Expertise:
Mainly mathematical terms, but also physical science, including physics, chemistry, and astronomy.

James has a BS in mathematics, an MS in computer engineering, and 35 years’ experience in the computer field. He is a contributor of mathematical antedatings to the web site Earliest Known Uses of Some of the Words of Mathematics.

Contact James A. Landau:
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(609) 272-9000, ext. 233

Lynne Murphy
Areas of Expertise:
Word meaning; American versus British English; socionyms—that is, names for categories of people (race, sexual orientation, nationality, etc.); relations among words, especially oppositeness (antonyms); Scrabble crossword game.

Affiliation
Senior Lecturer in Linguistics, University of Sussex, Brighton UK

Some Publications:

(in press) Lexical meaning. Cambridge University Press.

(in press) (with Anu Koskela) Key terms in semantics. Continuum Publishing.

2003. Semantic relations and the lexicon: antonyms, synonyms and other semantic paradigms. Cambridge University Press.

1998. Defining people: race and ethnicity in South African English dictionaries. International Journal of Lexicography 11:1.1-33.

1997. The elusive bisexual: social categorization and lexico-semantic change. In Kira Hall and Anna Livia (eds.), Queerly phrased: language, gender, and sexuality. New York: Oxford UP, 35-57.

Contact Lynne Murphy:
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phone (UK): +44-1273-678844
http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com

Salikoko S. Mufwene
The Frank J. McLoraine Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics and the College, University of Chicago

Areas of Expertise:
Ecology of language evolution, especially regarding language diversification, language birth, and language death.

Sali is currenctly conducting research on colonization, globalization, and language, including (English) creoles, indigenized Englishes, and contact languages of central Africa (especially Lingala and Kikongo-Kituba), from which he extrapolates to other languages.

He has published on Gullah (USA), African American English (a.k.a. Ebonics), indigenized Englishes, French varieties of Africa, and Jamaican Creole, among other languages.

Contact Sali Mufwene:
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Office: (773) 702-8531
Visit his web site

Barry Popik
consultant, Oxford English Dictionary
consulting editor, Oxford Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink (2004)
contributor, Historical Dictionary of American Slang; Dictionary of American Regional English; Paul Dickson’s New Baseball Dictionary

Areas of Expertise:
Americanisms, slang, new words, phrases, food terms, sports terms, political terms, specifically the true histories and origins of “Big Apple,” “Windy City,” “hot dog,” “I’m from Missouri” and other terms.

Barry was formerly an administrative law judge in the New York City bureau of parking violations. He now lives in Texas. His website, www.barrypopik.com, includes much of his research and many of his discoveries.

Publications:

Contributor, Comments on Etymology (Gerald Cohen, editor)

Co-author with Gerald Cohen of Studies in Slang, part VI

Contact Barry Popik:
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Dennis R. Preston
Michigan State University, University Distinguished Professor of Linguistics

Areas of Expertise:
American dialects, language variation and change, language attitudes, folk linguistics.

Dennis received a BA in Humanities from the University of Louisville in 1961, and his PhD in English Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin in 1969.

Publications:

With Nancy Niedzielski, 2003, rev. pb. ed, Folk Linguistics, Mouton de Gruyter.

With Daniel Long (eds), 2000, Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology II,
Benjamins.

Ed. 2003, Needed Research in American Dialects, 2003 (PADS 88).

Contact Dennis Preston:
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Luanne von Schneidemesser
Senior Editor, Dictionary of American Regional English

Areas of Expertise:
Dictionary of American Regional English, dictionaries, German influence on America English

Luanne has been with DARE since 1978. She received her PhD in German linguistics/philology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Publications:

An Index by Region, Usage, and Etymology to the Dictionary of American Regional English, Volume III. Publication of the American Dialect Society 82 (1999). Durham NC: Duke University Press.

“Settlement History in the United States as Reflected in DARE: the Example of German.” American Speech 77 (2002): 398-418.

“Soda or Pop?” Journal of English Linguistics 24 (1996): 270-87.

“Terms Used for Children’s Games: Comparing DARE’s Findings with Usage of Today’s Youth.” Varieties of English Around the World: Focus on the USA. Edgar W. Schneider, ed. Vol. 16 (1996): 63-80.

Contact Luanne von Schneidemesser:
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Office: (608) 265-0532

Fred R. Shapiro
Associate Librarian for Collections and Access and Lecturer in Legal Research, Yale Law School; Editor, Yale Book of Quotations

Areas of Expertise:
Origins of quotations, origins of words.

Publications:

Yale Book of Quotations (Yale University Press, 2006, intended to be the most authoritative quotation book)

Stumpers!: Answers to Hundreds of Questions That Stumped the Experts (Random House, 1998)

Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations (Oxford University Press,
1993)

Contact Fred Shapiro:
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Office: (203) 432-4840

Jesse Sheidlower
Editor At Large, Oxford English Dictionary

Areas of Expertise: Dictionaries, Americanisms, slang, word origins.

Contact Jesse Sheidlower:
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Office: (212) 726-6215

Arthur K. Spears
Areas of Expertise:
African-American English, controversial expressions
(obscenity), Haitian French Creole, pidgin and creole languages.

Affiliation:
City University of New York

Major Publications:

Makoni, Sinfree, Geneva Smitherman, Arnetha F. Ball, and Arthur K. Spears, eds. 2003. Black Linguistics: Language, Society and Politics in Africa and the Americas. New York: Routledge.

Spears, Arthur K., ed. 1999. Race and Ideology: Language, Symbolism, and Popular Culture. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

“African American Communicative Practices: Performativity, Semantic License and Augmentation.” In Talkin Black Talk, ed. by H. Samy Alim and John Baugh, 100-111. New York: Teachers College Press. 2007

Perspectives: A View of the “N-Word” from Sociolinguistics. Diverse Issues in Higher Education - Online. July 13, 2006.

“Directness in the Use of African-American English.” Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African-American English, ed. by Sonja L. Lanehart, 239-259. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 2001.

“African-American Language Use: Ideology and So-Called Obscenity.” African American English: Structure, History, and Usage, ed. by Salikoko S. Mufwene, John R. Rickford, Guy Bailey, and John Baugh, 226-250. New York: Routledge. 1998.

Contact Arthur Spears:
phone: (212) 650-7350
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http://www.arthurkspears.com/

Robert Wachal
Professor Emeritus, Linguistics Department, University of Iowa

Ph.D. (University of Wisconsin), 1964, 37 years of teaching and research

Areas of Expertise:
ESL, English grammar, English usage, abbreviations, lexicography

Publications:
Houghton-Mifflin Abbreviations Dictionary (1st ed.)
Articles in American Speech on grammar and usage

Contact Robert Wachal:
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319-331-4012

Dave Wilton
Editor, WordOrigins.org

Areas of Expertise:
Word, phrase, and slang origins.

Dave is a graduate of Lafayette College, where he received a BA, and of George Washington University, where he received an MA. He is currently working as a software product manager in Silicon Valley, and in a past life worked in defense contracting and arms control negotiations.

Author:

Word Myths: Debunking Urban Legends About Language, Oxford Univ.
Press, 2004

Contact Dave Wilton:
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Office: (408) 566-6320

Ben Zimmer
Executive Producer, the Visual Thesaurus
Consultant, the Oxford English Dictionary

Areas of Expertise:
word origins, neologisms, American speech, dictionaries and thesauruses

Ben studied linguistics as an undergraduate at Yale University and linguistic anthropology as a doctoral student at the University of Chicago. From 2006 to 2008, he was editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press. He has also been a research associate at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He currently serves on the Executive Council of the American Dialect Society.

Ben’s column Word Routes, on the origins of words and phrases, appears regularly on the Visual Thesaurus. He is also a regular contributor to Language Log. His writing about language has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Slate, and two recent blog anthologies: Ultimate Blogs and Far from the Madding Gerund.

Contact Ben Zimmer:
Office: (212) 381-0550
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http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/contributors/10
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?author=8

Arnold M. Zwicky
Visiting Professor of Linguistics, Stanford University

Areas of Expertise:
Syntactic variation, speech errors, gay language, style and stylistics, formulaic language, literature giving advice on grammar, style, and usage.

Publications:

Numerous posts to Language Log since 2003

1995. Exceptional degree markers: A puzzle in external and internal syntax. OSU WPL 47.111-23.

1997. Two lavender issues for linguists. Kira Hall & Anna Livia (eds.), Queerly phrased. Oxford Univ. Press (1997) 21-34.

2002. I wonder what kind of construction that this example illustrates. David Beaver et al. (eds.), The construction of meaning. Stanford CA: CSLI (2002) 219-48.

2002. Seeds of variation and change. Handout for NWAV.

Contact Arnold Zwicky:
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~zwicky/”>http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~zwicky
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Stanford office: (650) 725-0023
Home: (650) 323-0753
Private office: (650) 843-0550

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