Little Red Corvettes

The OEDILF began as a joke about compiling an Oxford English Dictionary in limerick form, but once it became a reality the O became Omnificent to avoid legal headaches. Nonetheless, the OED remains a valuable source for our definitions, although its value is limited by the restricted access most have to the complete dictionary. Some of us have access via a university, though, including yours truly. In 2006 I started using that access to add lists of new OED words (as published in their quarterly updates) to our Word List, replenishing the depleting ranks of the latter with fresh, up-to-date neologisms and new meanings of old words.

I kept this up for a while, answering occasional forum queries about the OED definitions of words I’d added, and then lost track in the early 2010s. In 2016, returning after a few years of low activity, I gathered up all of the new words from the 23 updates I’d missed, merged and sorted and cleaned up the entries, and added around six thousand new in-range words from them to the Word List. Unfortunately, this set the cat among the pigeons (“Draft additions March 2009: colloquial. to put the cat among the pigeons and variants: to do or say something which causes trouble, controversy, or upset”).

“Red Car” is a Red Car

The OEDILF has long had a policy of not allowing “red cars” as defined words: our name for compound words or phrases which have no particular meaning beyond their constituent parts. As someone who in the past argued against expanding the scope of definable words too widely (as happened when we started allowing encyclopaedic terms such as the names of places, works of art, and historical figures), I was all for that, and still am (although I’ve come to terms with encyclopaedic terms). But adding hundreds of new compound words all at once revealed significant disagreement in our ranks about what exactly constituted a red car.

For me, if a compound is significant enough to be listed in the OED—or any other reputable dictionary—then it isn’t a red car. After all, the OED doesn’t have an entry or sub-entry for red car. The definitions of some of the words our Editor-in-Chief considered red cars illuminated their significance:

• crown-wearing, “(a) the practice of wearing a crown; (b) Brit. Hist. a ceremony at which a crown is worn by a monarch, usually as a religious and political ritual”—a noun, not an adjective as a plain reading would suggest.
• Academy member—this can have a generic sense, but in the U.S. it specifically implies a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and in the U.K. a member of the Royal Academy.
• dog poo (crap, etc.)—listed under dog in the OED, although dog shit is a headword there. These are significant in a way that, for example, marmoset poo isn’t; even in a way that cat poo isn’t, because that doesn’t make the cut in the OED.
• discus thrower—the only word available for “someone who takes part in the modern sport of discus throwing” (as opposed to the Ancient Greek and Roman sport, a practitioner of which was a discobolus). There’s no one-word counterpart of footballer along the lines of discus-er. Discus throwing itself is a compound word; the sport isn’t called discus.

“Red car” is a red car because it has no distinctive sense over and above the words themselves (setting aside its meaning to us as OEDILF jargon). The compounds above are in the OED because they have a distinctive sense beyond what the constituent words themselves convey; when we look at them closely there’s more to their definitions than “car that is red”. Some might look like red cars on first blush, but that just means they need further investigation, as with a great many words on our Word List.

Our Editor-in-Chief took a different position:

If a reader understands each of the words that make up a two-or-more-word [defined word], bingo, we don’t define it. Its presence in the OED makes no difference.

I was perplexed by this, and said so. By that standard, most of the phrases we’ve defined at the OEDILF would be invalid—and many single words as well, like cat, dog and aardvark. Were we to disallow compound words just because it seemed obvious what the compound meant, without checking to see whether we’d assumed too much, we would have to disallow a lot of secondary definitions of single words as well. Dog obviously means “member of the canine family”—except when it means “to pursue relentlessly”.

English-speakers can also figure out what many single words mean by knowing about their root words and the rules of prefixes and suffixes. A footballer is someone who plays football. A writer is someone who writes. Being able to figure it out shouldn’t be reason enough to dismiss a defined word, especially as our assumptions can lead us astray: a computer isn’t someone who computes (although it used to mean that).

Why ban recognised English words from our Word List or from submission because they fail some arbitrary test about what constitutes recognition? Because we’d rather write on agammaglobulinemic than on age group? Some of the proper names and phrases that have been limericked since our remit was expanded are less significant than the words under discussion. Some members object to the obscurity of the words in question, but neither dog poo nor discus thrower is as obscure as agammaglobulinemic. Many OEDILF limericks’ Defined Words lists contain the scientific names of species and genuses, which are far less common “English” words than any of the examples above.

Ruling words off-limits just because they’re made up of two words and their meaning is obvious would cut us off from a great deal of the growth of the English language. Many words are formed in this way nowadays, rather than through wholly new coinages like quiz. For example, we all know what disk drive means; even if we don’t, we can figure it out from its constituent parts, and if we think of computer disks when we see disk we’ll guess correctly, more or less. It’s a two-word compound listed under disc/disk in the OED, not a headword itself. It’s also in the OEDILF, and has been for years. Nobody in the relevant workshop even mentioned red cars.

Disk drive is also a reminder of the significant downside to our approach of crawling through the alphabet in strict order. We would have great fun limericking contemporary words like plasma TV, speed dating, and Texas Hold ’Em—which are all in the OED—but by the time future OEDILFers reach them they’ll seem quaint.

Little Red Corvette, by the way, is a potential defined word for the OEDILF (within its encyclopaedic scope) as the title of a worldwide top-ten song by Prince; but little red corvette is a red car.

The “red car” test complicates matters far more than necessary. If a word is in an English dictionary, we should be able to write on it. If it isn’t in a dictionary yet, we might still want to write on it, if we think we can muster enough compelling evidence of usage to convince enough editors. The chances of a limerick with no dictionary support that doesn’t have a case for sufficient English usage chancing upon four easy markers and an “easy” Associate Editor are vanishingly small. The names of historical figures, places and other cultural icons are also fair game, although you’ll have to work harder to explain the obscure ones.

If a word on the Word List isn’t in a freely available online dictionary, so what? Plenty of words on it mean nothing to me, so I leave them for others. If baby care annoys you for its obviousness, don’t write on it; leave it for someone who isn’t annoyed or who has access to the OED.

OEDisreputable

If a word makes it into a reputable dictionary it won’t be a red car—it will have a meaning over and above a simple interpretation of its constituent words. It would be rather hubristic of us to look down our noses at the most famous dictionary of the English language, the one from which we took our inspiration. The staff of the OED spend their entire working lives vetting their entries and thinking about words. Many of us have spent a lot of time doing the same, but that doesn’t make us better than them at doing it.

The OED isn’t perfect; it doesn’t include every word in the English language, for one. But the words it does include are English words. Would anyone seriously suggest otherwise? The exceptions would be so few as to be trivial.

This isn’t blind acceptance on my part, but respecting the professional judgment of its lexicographers, the same way we’d respect the judgment of any professional. If we identify an error in a specific OED definition we can and will address it, but rejecting whole classes of words that it identifies as valid is a long way from a degree of healthy caution.

Limiting the sources for the Word List or acceptable defined words to a specific list of reputable dictionaries would also be problematic. It would inevitably omit the sorts of niche dictionaries that turn up some of the more obscure, out-of-the-way words that are fun to write on. I’m possibly the only OEDILFer who owns the book Tassie Terms: A Glossary of Tasmanian Words (OUP, 1995), and haven’t actually written anything from it yet,† but I reserve the right to do so.

†I have now.

Whither Word List?

The OEDILF Word List has served as an inspiration to our writers since the beginning. I’ve written elsewhere about some of its effects on our early culture, and how those have changed over time. It’s included compound words for a long time, and many long-approved limericks have been written on them.

What’s the point of removing particular dictionary words from the Word List? To keep the Word List tidy? To limit the number of words we have to cover, because we imagine that restricting the Word List will mean that the OEDILF is “finished” in our lifetimes?

The OEDILF will never be finished. Even if we miraculously reach a point where we’ve covered every single English word that exists or has ever existed, we’ll then have to switch to a watching brief to define new coinages and new meanings of existing words as they emerge, which they will keep doing for as long as there are English-speakers.

In our first twelve years we covered 80450 unique words. There are at least a quarter of a million English words, but when we include technical and regional terms that number goes up, and when we include phrases and proper names of places and historical figures it goes up even more. A million unique words might not be out of the question. At our rate of progress, we’re looking at 150 years to cover them; but then we’d have to add whatever the language comes up with in the next 150 years; and the multiple meanings of particular words that we haven’t covered; and so on. It will be centuries before the OEDILF is “complete enough”, and even then it will still never be complete.

Completing the dictionary isn’t the point; enjoying the process is. And many people are going to enjoy writing on discus thrower more than on agammaglobulinemic.

As for finishing the OEDILF within the lifetimes of its current members, if we go down the path of barring dictionary-derived words that don’t fit a particular interpretation of a “red car” rule, we can guarantee that we never will, because any declaration of being “finished” will be obviously false. The only way we will ever truly be finished is when someone can look up any English word, in any of its multiple senses if it has them, and find a limerick for it.

If we define “finished” as meaning “reaching zz-”, then that’s totally arbitrary, as our pace is determined by our Editor-in-Chief’s rate of opening new letter ranges; and if the coverage of intervening ranges isn’t important, we’re already there.

We can never truly open up new ranges because the old ones are “complete”, because we’re always finding new words in the old ranges. Depleting a letter range in the Word List at a particular moment in time doesn’t tell us much about how completely we’ve covered it out in the wild, not only because of new or newly unearthed words but also because we have many “old range” words whose multiple meanings we’ve barely touched.

We’ve replenished the A’s, for example, many times since we first declared it complete enough to move on to B. We’re still writing on A’s. There will, to all practical intents and purposes, always be new A’s... so moving on to new letter ranges is more a matter of motivating ourselves by creating a feeling of progress. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Withered Word List

My arguments in defence of these supposed “red cars”—which I still, six years later, believe aren’t—didn’t prevail; the final decision was to remove them. If the logic had been that these weren’t proper words, then we might have needed to reconsider the Omnificent in our name; but the argument, in the end, was more one of practicality: that having a Word List full of words only found in the OED was frustrating for writers without access to it who needed to look them up.

I can see the pragmatism in that. The flipside, though, is that all of us—not only those who have OED access—have lost a valuable source of inspiration, now that the “Random Words” button no longer serves up these new compound words. Instead, it gives us such accessible gems as Halenia, escheatable, derodidymus, facetectomy, hiphalt, hecatompedon and cytoplasmatic, to list a random selection from the time of writing (only three of the random selection of ten had meanings that were a little more obvious—Guernsey Elm, capitalization issue and electro-therapeutics—although they would still need looking up).

Words from the OED are still valid candidates for limericks, as they’re inarguably English words... but we can’t have them in the Word List, because, as I grumpily observed in 2016, they might inspire someone to write on them. In time, the OED words were indeed removed from the Word List—I resignedly helped by removing all of the unique words that remained from the OED lists I’d used to add them years earlier—and were posted in a forum thread, never to inspire again.

I’m still unsure why weeding the Word List became a higher priority than other more fun things we could be doing at the OEDILF, especially when words will inevitably have been weeded out that would have inspired great limericks. I once spotted what I thought was an error in the Word List, the word erw, and then discovered it was anything but, and got a good limerick out of it. If I’d deleted it from the Word List without looking it up first, I would have cut off a valid word and a fun writing possibility. Let people deal with words individually as they get to them, I reckon, and let people decide what they want to take inspiration from; that’s the value of the Word List in the first place—or at least it was for me, back when I knew I could find familiar English words on it.

The OEDILF has been part-encyclopaedia as well as dictionary since the very early days. When expanding its scope was first suggested in our forums, several of us questioned the idea, believing that a more limited remit would help keep the sense of fun and achievement going. I’ve long since changed my mind about that, and see these new words in a similar light. Given that English-speakers coin compounds these days more often than single-word neologisms, denying ourselves new compound words cuts off some great opportunities to write about current phenomena, and if we’re serious about encouraging people to join or write more for us, that should be a real concern.

These words are often far more inspirational than the obscure scientific words the Word List is regularly left with. I submitted five times as many new limericks in the two months of the red car debate as I did in the preceding four; they weren’t all on compound words, but writing on those got me fired up again. They could do the same for others, too.

Reworked from forum comments from March–May 2016.