The Lexicon Project
begun February 2025

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This fundamental subjectivity of experience makes every word we write and utter
a bottle of pressurized ambiguity effervescent with myriad meanings,
tossed into the ocean of experience in the touching hope that
it will convey a clear message about what we see and what we feel.
The great miracle is that we understand each other at all.

Maria Popova from Marginalian, 4ii25

...words can squirt sideways, mute and mad; you think they are tools, or toys, or tame,
and all at once they burn all your clothes off and you're standing there
singed and ridiculous in the glare of the lightning.

Anne Carson

(see more epigrams)

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Gathering and exploring words has been a lifelong enterprise, though I've never managed to be systematic, still less professional in methods or intent. I suppose I'm a self-taught and soi disant amateur lexicologist. I model myself upon the baleen whale mode of feeding: take in a great mouthful and expel the water to filter the edible bits.

The Incoming gets read and linked. Some words and phrases leap out, as if from Rabbit Holes... and sometimes they get written down on the yellow pads, and sometimes tyey spawn firther searches, and sometimes the results make it into my html world, somewhere within oook.info. That's pretty much every day. I've tried (not very consistently or systematically) to COLLECT

• lexical curiosities that caught my attention (lexadd.html)
  and
  
• sites and texts encountered that seem to bear upon /lexicon: (lexgather.html)

At this time (27ix26) they're more or less chronologies of encounters, but they could be sorted and arrayed in divers ways (as an example, consider the potential uses of a collection of posts from Language Log, an authoritative and eclectic blog hosted at Penn State)

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The /lexicon Project began as an outgrowth of a bout of the curatorial among the Word Books on my shelves, and the recognition that language use is at the very heart of Anthropology.

My exploration of lexicon takes place within speech communities that use words and phrases to convey meaning in discourse.

The method includes catching portentous words and phrases as they go by, explicating their sociocultural significance and exploring their speech community settings and implications.

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I identify four senses of 'lexicon':

1. the words of a language, as collected and analyzed, for English by (e.g.) The Oxford English Dictionary

2. specialist vocabularies (occupational, social, scientific...) used by socioculturally defined subpopulations

3. words and phrases of significance in one's personal language, especially expressions one recognizes as mots justes; one's idiolect

4. words and phrases used in current discourse; memes and catchphrases; Keywords are a special subset

It's important to remember that

• the oral-aural lexicon and the textual lexicon have substantial overlap and ceaseless exchanges.
• and to be aware that media we call 'social' have their own emergent dialects and styles (telegrapic text, emoticons/emojis, etc.) that are part of the vast enterprise of Lexicon;
• and to leave room for exchanges with the Lexicons of other languages, including borrowing [etymology captures some of that], pidgins and creoles, and the dynamism of those Other Englishes.
• One's various media contribute a continual parade of novel and otherwise curious words, well worth trying to capture on the fly.
• ...and not to forget Humpty Dumpty's Philosophy of Meaning

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And what of those who labor in these vineyards?

Samuel Johnson defines Lexicographer:
...A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge,
that busies himself in tracing the original,
and detailing the signification of words
(via the marvelous johnsonsdictionaryonline.com)

The signification... It's a grand challenge to compose/contrive glosses for items that enter the personal lexicon, and for those alive in public discourse of a speech community. Such exegetical texts might summarize historical emergence and sociocultural cross-linkage, but the real point is to capture the significance of the expression: what does it mean below the surface of its dictionary definition?

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subsections to be elaborated and mapped:

Keywords and especially MY Keywords

Onomastics

Neologisms

Words that should exist

Toothsome phrases

Vernacular

Etymology

Translation: across the permeable membrane

affixes

-nyms: acro-, backro-, meta- etc.

Memes and Coinages

Catchphrases

Dialects and 'Other Englishes'

Texting and Emojis: language in 'social media'

Platitudes and Phatic Speech

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Badmouthing and Vilification

Fightin' Words

Oaths and Intensifiers

Calumny, denigration and disparagement

Culture Wars

You Can't Say That: taboos

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A dashboard of search and access portals

Online lexicons

AI Lexicons: a collection

Books about dictionaries

Word Books on my shelves

OED Online trial 1995

Semantics

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An example of material to braid into /lexicon:
Rhetoric and Genre and Louche with a side of Filboid Studge

(Bruce Sterling has a wonderful post at Medium. using Saki's text as a Midjourney prompt)

And so it goes.

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