Love that blogosphere...
I was already amazed that Benjamin Zimmer of Oxford UP had managed to archive the ABC broadcast within a scant few minutes (seconds?) of the World News Tonight broadcast. He's just blown my socks off by finding my previous post inside 24 hours and responding with a very thoughtful and kind explanation. So props (that's contemporary slang for "proper respects," by the way ;-) to Mr. Zimmer! Even though I pinged a number of blog-tracking databases, my post still should've been obscure enough to make it hard to dig up. I should've known the OU people would have put the OU (ow?) in "research hOUnd."
I should also take this opportunity to recognize that I didn't mean to criticize OUP too harshly (and certainly not Mr. Zimmer, personally, at all!). I should have pre-empted any possible mis-understanding by adding a question mark in the previous post title. I think I'll just leave the title as is, on the way to owning up to a least little personal responsibility for what I dump on the blogosphere. I.e., I posted it, I have to live with many possible reactions. ;-) My apologies if anyone felt overly wounded by the title, or the tone, of the post.
I was mostly reacting to the subjective problem faced by OUP, linguists, and non-linguists like me who care about language. I certainly find it reassuring that the collection process is not just a matter of popular opinion, that OUP uses the best judgment it can, and that OUP lexicographers and technology staff make a never-ending effort to refine their Oxford English Corpus database. I'm not sure what else factors into arriving at that judgment, but I don't doubt for a minute that OU has a bevy of excellent, well-intentioned people doing an extremely complex and valuable job that the rest of us would never dare attempt.
That subjective judgment call is bound up in emotion for some of us non-linguists who enjoy their native language. As I said earlier, I'm happy to have the language percolating in fascinating ways across millions of websites, blogs, chatrooms and other online sources. I've explored chatspeak a bit myself, though I'm still lousy at it. ("Chatspeak?" Can we stick that one in there? :-)
I just have a strong, subjective aversion to recording the duplication of the meaning of existing words and phrases through phonetically close variants arrived at through -- there's no other way I know to put it -- ignorance and error of spelling. I just have a value-laden instinct that I would greatly prefer some way of refining what gets codified, so that eggcorns, frankly, get the short end of the stick. Shoo'ed out, rather than shoo'ed in.
I realize we arrived at a great deal of contemporary English by misspelling things. I think that was forgivable up until sometime in the early to mid 20th century, with the growth of universal public education in much of the English-speaking world. Now when I see eggcorns, I cringe. We're too busy gulping down Twinkies and playing video games to learn English? OK, fine, but can we leave the resulting redundant language droppings where they lie?
I certainly don't have the hubris to expect that my value-driven and layman's viewpoint will win the day, but I like ranting on occasion, and hope it might have an influence, of course!
That said, I enjoyed Mr. Zimmer's devilishly sharp example of "strait-laced" vs. "straight-laced" -- and I want to commend OUP for the best etymological research in the business. Props to all of you!
Oh - and I just wish I could afford a single-user OED subscription. ;-)
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