Word: burchfields
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Many of the entries are borrowed from U.S. minority groups (such as the Yiddish "kvetch" and the Spanish "machismo"), causing Supplement Editor R.W. Burchfield to fear that the Queen's English will become all but incomprehensible with the invasion of "late Mayflower" Americanese. Nonetheless, three of his 30 staffers are now scouring the byways of the American landscape for new words to put into Volume III. By the time they reach the Zs it will be 1982, and the supplement to the supplement will undoubtedly need updating...
...which R.W. Burchfield, the O.E.D.'s chief editor, replies, in effect, "balderdash." He told the Philological Society that "we are concerned with the accurate recording of language, not what people think it should be." Burchfield's chief concession to his lexicographical critics has been to include in the supplement's definition of Jew a historical note explaining how Jews became known as moneylenders in England during the Middle Ages.* If by chance Shloimovitz does win his case, the O.E.D. will undoubtedly have other aggrieved readers in the courtroom. Among them might be thousands of irate Yorkshiremen. "Yorkshire...
...most expensive American sculpture in history, at $125,000. The previous record for an American watercolor ($36,000 for an Edward Hopper in 1970) was broken three times-by another Hopper, Light at Two Lights, at $50,000; a Winslow Homer, Adirondack Catch, at $37,500; and Charles Burchfield's Black Iron, which brought $65,000. That same week, another and very fine Homer-Gallows Island (Bermuda)-also went for $65,000. And the price of every sort of "Americana" -that tract of once largely ignored painting, sculpture and craft that stretches from colonial America to the 20th century...
...project so far has taken 15 years. Supplement Editor R.W. Burchfield, a native of New Zealand and a teacher at St. Peter's College, Oxford, has had nearly 100 reader-scribes scouring fiction, nonfiction, newspapers and scientific journals from all over the English-speaking world in search of references to their assigned words. Some of the readers worked for nothing, while most freelanced for about $1 an hour. The oldest was a cleric in his 90s who is also listed as a contributor to the first O.E.D. The most prolific was a British book reviewer, Marghanita Laski, who supplied...
Certainly one of the greatest cultural anticlimaxes of modern times is the O.E.D.'s already much publicized decision to include all those dirty four-letter words. "We did not hold back," says Burchfield. "Various expressions and circumlocutions for sexual, excretory and menstrual functions are all treated at appropriate length...