In my Friday (5/24) appointment with my rheumatologist, David Fischer, the doctor reported that he had found me cited as a distinguished linguist, in writing by a lexicographer whose name he couldn’t quite recall, except that it had a K in it. (It’s always a good thing when your doctors treat you as a knowledgeable person of consequence.) I allowed that I hung out with lexicographers and that I was in fact extremely famous in a very small world. We then had to press on to my arthritic gout and its treatment, in the brief time for the appointment, but afterwards I e-mailed him with two suggestions about the identity of the lexicographer:
most likely: Kory Stamper, author of Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries (2017), though I didn’t recall her having cited me
also possible: Arika Okrent, author of In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language (2009), who certainly did cite me
The answer is: KS, in Word by Word. On page 196:
This citation [of American Dream] sounds as if it were written last year. It’s from 1900.
This is one of the joys of dating: everything is older than you think it is. The linguist Arnold Zwicky has coined the term “the recency illusion” to refer to the misbegotten assumption that anything that strikes you as new in language is a recent innovation, when, in fact, it’s not.
So: just linguist, not distinguished linguist. Fair enough; all she needed to assert was that I’m not just some random mook off the street, but a person with relevant expertise. And I hadn’t really noted the citation, because everybody [for some value of everybody] cites me for the recency illusion and the frequency illusion.
The books and their authors. Alphabetically by author (Arika before Kory, Okrent before Stamper).
Okrent 2009.
(#1)
On AO, see my 10/23/15 posting “LSA award: Arika Okrent”.
Stamper 2017.
(#2)
See my 4/30/17 posting “Word by Word”, about the book and its author; and the Page on this blog about my postings on illusions (recency, frequency, and more).
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