The Lexicon Project
February and March 2025

(workspace at oook.info/lexicon/lexgather.html)

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The 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.

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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Here is a running tally of my recent encounters, each of which wants an explicatory gloss.

And here's a dashboard of search and access portals

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from The Lexicon: An Introduction (Oxford Textbooks in Linguistics) Elisabetta Jezek (2016)

The lexicon is an abstract object, that is, a set of words with associated information,
stored in our mind and described in the dictionary...

The lexicon... is not organized alphabetically but rather
in word groupings whose members share similarities
from the point of view of their form and/or of their meaning...
A dictionary is an attempt to describe the lexicon...

...Lexicon and semantics intersect but do not coincide. (pp 1, 2, 5)

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Words are events, they do things, change things.
Ursula Le Guin, from The Wave in the Mind

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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

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...in order to expose, counter, harness, resist, or evade
the forces of today's political and technological regimes of uncertainty,
new theoretical vocabularies, methods, and alliances are needed.
Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data
Nanna Bonde Thylstrup et al. 2021, pg 2

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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

• Neologisms

• Words that should exist

• Vernacular

• Translation: across the permeable membrane

• -nyms: acro-, backro-, -meta etc.

• Memes and Coinages

• Catchphrases

• Dialects and 'Other Englishes'

• Texting and Emojis: language in 'social media'

• Platitudes and Phatic Speech

Badmouthing and Vilification

• Fightin' Words

• Oaths and Intensifiers

• Calumny, denigration and disparagement

• Culture Wars

• You Can't Say That: taboos

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Online lexicons

AI Lexicons: a collection

Books about dictionaries

Word Books on my shelves

OED Online trial 1995

Semantics

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Rhetoric and Genre and Louche with a side of Filboid Studge

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